World’s easiest Overdrive Effect

The story Behind this-

I always wanted an electric guitar, as I loved rock songs. When I got my first electric - a Fender™ Squier ™ Sonic HSS Stratocaster™, I felt something was missing from my rock tone. I realized that I needed a distortion/overdrive pedal, and I started making DIY pedals all by myself.

Bill Of Materials

You will need the following-

If you want, you can get a pack which includes the guitar, cables and amp here, although you will need to buy another cable as only one is included. BTW Don’t buy a guitar/amp/cable if you already have it!

What diodes to buy

1N34A
1N60
1N270
BAT41
BAT85
1N5711
1N5822
BAT54
1N5818
1N5819
1N6263

Now, these diodes will work, but silicon diodes won’t. - all germanium diodes will work, but I have just given this as a general list. I will use the IN34A diode for this circuit now, but any of these diodes will work

Circuit

So now that we have the components, let’s build the circuit!

Schematic-

These diodes have a very low minimum operating voltage of $0.2V$ to $0.3V$ also called Forward Voltage ($Vf$). When the electronic signal of the guitar exceeds the $Vf$, then it abruptly clips off the signal, making it sound overdriven or distorted.
Think of the diodes like a security guard that only lets signals below $0.2V$ pass through, but if a bigger signal comes, it says -

This causes distortion like seen below-

Without distortion            With Distortion

Tips to get the best sound

• Put your guitar’s volume knob to maximum
• Use the Bridge pickup
• If you have a Boost pedal like the Electro-Harmonix LPB-1, you can get more overdrive if you put it before this pedal
• JUST ROCK

What to do next

Now, that you’ve built a sucessful guitar pedal, the next step is building something more advanced. I recomend you build a MXR Distortion Plus

I hope that you enjoyed my blog and now will build more and more pedals!