Wednesday, 29 July 2009

Fred Briggs - Hummingbird Overdrive

Here's another one. I've had a lot of emails for this one. The best way I can describe it is as an "enhancer" - it makes and already good overdrive tone better! It produces a great low overdrive, the compression and shimmer controls are very interactive with regard to both the gain/clipping structure and the overall tone and feel of the device..

This design was born from a challenge set to me and a few others by Bjorn of BJF effects to build a circuit that sounded like the honeybee. Soulsonic came up with a very elegant and simple design called the Hunny Bunny: http://www.soulsonicfx.com/?page_id=88 (I love that circuit). The Humming Bird De'luxe is what I came up with and you can see the schematic below.



Here's a vero layout by Harald Sabro (http://www.sabrotone.com):


[NOTE] One of the capacitors is marked as 47k on the schematic - this should read 47n. Point B goes to the input of the mosfet stage.

4 comments:

  1. hi, I was looking for a new overdrive and this one could be something new and interesting..could you post please some bigger images? I can't read any value!

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  2. http://freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6741&hilit=hummingbird

    Scheme is there!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Fred,
    How are you? I find myself returning to your blog page often.

    Has/have anyone/you ever come up with a PCB layout for this? I've come across multiple threads in multiple forums on this design. The description sounds very interesting to me.

    -stevewire

    ReplyDelete
  4. Can you post a sound sample please? I have built a few of your circuits and love everyone of them.The PAF OD,64 vintage and Face.i'm going to go ahead and build this one cause i think i'll like it.i love the sound of germanium transistors.Thank you for all your work.

    ReplyDelete

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