The vintage drive models?

cole lewis

cole lewis

Experienced
I am just wondering if there is a particular reason why all the modern overdrive pedals in the axe have all these diode options, able to mix and match and all that while all the fuzz pedals and older drive pedals are left out of the equation. Is it just time? Are we just waiting for cliff to get around to that? Or is there something so different about modeling transistor pedals that makes it too hard to accomplish digitally or something like that?

I cant help but wish after having all the customization of all the newer overdrive models, to have customization like being able to switch between a certain germanium transistor in the faze fuzz model vs say a silicon BC108 transistor and a BC109. We have one version of the muff right now, which I love but it cant be that hard to replicate what my JHS muff pedal does, emulating the different types of muffs. I would be fine with one muff model then, being able to change the transistors or opamps, whatever muffs use, to go from different versions of the muff.

Well anyway, id like to hear what you guys think. Is this something you want done at some point or do you not care? Personally if cliff could manage this, I would probably never buy a drive pedal again. I apologize if there's some obvious answer as to why this is the case currently, that I somehow missed.
 
The diode-based Drives have the option to tweak the diodes that are used.

The others aren't diode-based... I don't think it has anything to do with "old" vs "new".
 
unix-guy said:
The diode-based Drives have the option to tweak the diodes that are used.

The others aren't diode-based... I don't think it has anything to do with "old" vs "new".
Click to expand...
As I said the "old" drives are transistor based not diodes. I am asking why the one sided focus on diode using pedals and nothing on transistor using pedals. I want to know if there is any interest from either cliff or anyone here in having the same thing for transistor drives as we now have with the diode drives. Before whatever update it was there was no customization of the diodes in the diodes based pedals either. Not sure why the focus on my wording of old vs new. I think it's pretty clear reading my post I understand the difference between diode pedals vs transistor pedals.

I can change the title to transistor based drives if you think that will make things more clear. But what I was asking doesnt just apply to transistors like my request to have an opamp version of the muff. (I realize I can go to the settings and change the silicon standard option to opamp but thats not the same)

What seems to be the case is cliff worked very hard on modeling all the different diode options we now have all im asking is if anyone wants to see the same kind of thing for transistor based drives or opamps, or whatever else people would maybe want to see.

My gut sense is it's just a matter of time before this is implemented in some way.
 
For example again, the face fuzz model, has the option of either germanium or silicon. But what about specific germanium or silicon transistors? The opamp muff again. Also the bender fuzz model, it defaults at "hard" clipping instead of germanium or silicon like most tonebenders I have seen.

Just thought maybe it would be nice to have the same kind of options with these drives that we have with the diode based pedals now.

I see people with real pedals who will buy two fuzz faces like a BC108 and a BC109 fuzz face because there is an obvious difference in sound between them. Both are a silicon but they arent the same.
 
Those things take time.... I’m sure it was a big undertaking to add the ability to swap diodes, and that was a recently added update.

Perhaps Cliff is already working on transistor modeling and just doesn’t have it done yet ?

Maybe he felt other things are more important to focus on at present ?

Maybe diodes were easier to do so he added it first ?

Could be plenty of reasons why....


That said, transistors of the same type can have very different sounds due to differences in gain, leakage etc

I’ve built stuff that sounded more different using different examples of the same transistor than it did using different types of transistors. In other words, two BC109’s can sound more different than some bc108 vs 109.

This is why measuring and selecting a specific transistor is more important than what it says on the can. You can’t just buy any old NKT off EBay and have it sound good because it’s a NKT. You need a NKT with certain spec., and most of the stuff being sold has already been picked over and rejected a few times before it hits eBay.

They all said, it’s a good idea and would be nice, but I’m sure Cliff has already considered it and is working on it
 
Agree in principle, but I wouldn't want CPU to go up more than a tiny bit, considering that the new diode algorithm (while sounding great) means some drives are 9% CPU now and not usable on some of my presets. For example, 4 diode-based DRV blocks use 36% CPU.
 
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There were germanium and also silicon Fuzz Face models. The one in the Axe FXIII is germanium. Is all you have to do is select silicon to have the silicon version of the Fuzz Face, or would you have to change some other things as well?
 
My assumption is that when modelling the diode based drive pedals, and seeing how many of those pedals were of the shape InputStage => AssortedCombinationOfDiodes => OutputStage Cliff built a system where he could put in different numbers and combinations of the math that simulates those diodes, so he could easily configure different overdrive types by picking the right kinds. Saving himself time in the process when adding new Drives. Then he was nice enough to expose that to us so we could do things like customize our TS808 models to be like the "GarageGuys LlamaSmasher" or whatever other variant that just adds an extra diode of a new type instead of needing to have a separate model for each.

I don't know whether a similar approach to transistor based drives wasn't implement because it's not feasible in the same way because the entire pedal design has to shift to accommodate a different transistor. Or if it just didn't look like it would be an overall time saver in the same way because of fewer transistor based drives and variants being asked for, so it hasn't been done.

But either way, I think this makes a good wish for the wish forum.
 
IronSean said:
My assumption is that [...] Cliff built a system where he could put in different numbers and combinations of the math that simulates those diodes, so he could easily configure different overdrive types by picking the right kinds.
Click to expand...

This was done way back in 3.02b (see also Cliff's post #10 on rationale)


Dave Merrill said:
I'm 200‰ making this up, but my guess is that Cliff had an insight into a new approach to modeling diode clipping behavior, so that's what got done.
Click to expand...

Did you see this from Cliff:
 
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