Midway Fair | 1 decade ago

The Clipper Ship Overdrive 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.

If you are interested in building your own, the schematic and layouts are on my web site (jonpattonmusic), and build threads are on DIYSB, Madbean, and BYOC.

This is version 2.0. The new version has a much lower noise floor, a less extreme tone knob, and a more pleasing frequency response overall. I'm really happy with the redesign.

Gear used:
Don Quixotecaster
Tone King Imperial
Fingers