King of the Brits (KOTB)

Introduction

Most JFET amp simulator pedals are cool. Not necessarily because they sound like real tube amps, but rather because they can sound pretty good in their own right. A friend of mine needed a Marshall-sounding circuit, so I looked around the web and picked K.O.T.B. (stands for “King of the Brits”). It aims at hot-rodded Marshall Plexi kind of tone – crunchy, raw, saturated.

plexi

Build

I built the pedal for a friend who doesn’t intend to use it as a stompbox, so I hosted it in a nice Hammond BB-sized plastic enclosure and used a DPDT toggle bypass switch which is easier to flick by hand. Also, one of the requests was to include guitar-style volume and tone controls separately from the effect because the guitar doesn’t have any controls on it. To prevent EM noise, I shielded the whole pedal with copper foil normally used to shield guitar cavities. I gave up using home-made PCBs and similar vero/strip boards altogether, so I got a professionally made PCB from Guitar PCB Shop. Professional PCBs are not that expensive and are much more reliable than home-brew boards.

SAM_7936

To speed up the wiring, I printed out control layout, glued it on a piece of thick cardboard and punched out all holes with a pen. That gives you much more freedom to work than than working in the tight space of the enclosure. I always liked the neat look of ribbon cables to connect the pots, so I got a 10×0.25mm ribbon cable and split it into 3 lead ribbons.

SAM_7931

How it Turned Out?

I was lucky (or experienced enough? :)) to get it up and running form the first try. Just needed to go through a couple of J201s and find the ones that suit the circuit best, as there is no way to adjust the bias with trimmers. I was aiming for roughly 4.5V on the drain (half of B+) for Q1, Q2, Q3, Q5, about 4.5V on the source for Q4 and about 7V on the drain of Q6 (because of a much smaller drain resistor). KOTB has surprisingly high amounts of gain and compression, even with gain pot set at the lowest. So much that I realized it was a great idea to have input volume and tone controls to tame the gain if needed.

SAM_7928

It seemed a bit redundant to have separate Master and Level controls, but after playing with the pedal, having both actually makes a lot of sense. Cranking Master brings out even more distortion from the last two gain stages, simulating what happens in a power amp of a real tube amp maxed out. You can also do the reverse – set Master low to reduce distortion and crank the Level up to boost the output without distorting the sound further. Very cool.

Voltage Reference (taken from GuitarPCB.com forum)

Qx: D/S/G – measured in V
Q1: 4.55/.39/0
Q2: 4.31/.41/0
Q3: 4.33/.33/0
Q4: 9.33/4.87/4.33
Q5: 5.2/1.85/1.1
Q6: 7.75/.21/0

Video Clips

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Comments
3 Responses to “King of the Brits (KOTB)”
  1. Steve Browne says:

    Oh by the way, I did listen to your sound clips. Your pedal sounds great. I have really hot humbuckers on my guitar and I definitely need to do something like you did to calm the distortion down a bit.
    thanks again.

  2. Steve Browne says:

    I have the same circuit and found the same situation as far as the seriously high gain even at low settings. I really like the circuit (the pedal) a lot. I would really like to install the volume and tone pots at the input like you did. I am new to pedal building. I have built a few but I still have a lot to learn. Would you mind telling me how to install them and what parts I’ll need? It would be greatly appreciated. By the way the first K.O.T.B. I built is in the gallery on guitar pcb. Stevieb is my handle on the site. I am seriously hooked on the diy pedals.
    I GOT THE FEVER !! 😀

    • Bancika says:

      Hey,
      you just need two pots and a capacitor. I used 500k log pots and 22nF capacitor. They are wired the same was as in a guitar, take a look at les paul wiring or any guitar. Volume is wired as a voltage divider and tone is a variable resistor that shunts higher frequencies to ground through a 22nF cap.
      cheers

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    The idea behind this site is to share my experience with Do It Yourself approach to guitars, amplifiers and pedals. Whether you want to save a couple of bucks by performing a mod or upgrade yourself instead of paying a tech, or want to build your own piece of gear from scratch, I'm sure you will find something interesting here. Also, this is the home of DIY Layout Creator, a free piece of software for drawing circuit layouts and schematics, written with DIY enthusiasts in mind.