Clipper Ship Overdrive. This is a dirty boost cascaded into a FET-based booster (a tweaked version of R.G. Keen’s “SRPP,” based on the AMZ Mini Booster). The gain control goes from clean to fuzzy, but the pedal always cleans up with your guitar’s volume, making it a very open and touch sensitive dirt pedal. And the boost stage has gobs of output to push your amp into its own overdrive. A “stupidly wonderful tone control” allows for treble boost clockwise and treble cut counterclockwise. This build used a Russian germanium transistor for the dirt side and germanium diodes. The overall character is kind of Vox-y.
Edited notes from the schematic files:
Q1: Any Ge or Si. Germanium with hfe 40-70 sounded best to me and cleaned up well. Q2 & Q3: 2N5457, J201, or other JFET.
Ge1, G2: Diodes should have a Fv < .3v for best performance. Many schotkey diodes will also work great. Red Ge diode prevents temperature changes from affecting the leakage of a Ge transistor. Omit if using a silicon in Q1.
My prototype of version 2.0 used a russian MP38A Ge transistor in Q1 (~61 hfe, leakage ~ 60uA) and Smallbear "Generic" Ge diodes.
This is interesting: ANY transistor will work in Q1 ... including PNP. I can't really recommend using a PNP without more information on why it worked, though.
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