How To Make A Guitar Overdrive Pedal From Scratch

We’ll see how to use an op-amp and clipping diodes to distort the signal from an electric guitar.

When it comes to distortion, almost every electric guitar player has faced the dilemma of whether to use a transistor-based pedal or to turn all the way up the gain of a valve amplifier. It is common lore that while the latter sounds better, the former is usually cheaper and harder to break physically. Yes, there are also amp simulations that run on DSP chips, but that’s another story…