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Real tube driver pedal6/18/2023 The Sustain pot controls the built in compression, Drive is the distortion level, and Gain is the volume level. Very high gain with built in compression. Hand made by BK Butler in Escondido, California, circa 1979-1981. I guess small bear didn't sell dust caps for the pots 3 years ago - you can see the double sided tape keeping the pots from shorting out the board. 204 Tube Driver (Butronics) - 3 knobs, blue Bud box aluminum enclosure. The pots were all scratchy and exact replacements are not obtainable so I managed to fit 16mm long pin Alphas in there. I tacked a 10uF capacitor on the end of R13 as suggested in the analogguru schematic to keep DC of the LO EQ pot. In the Baja design, the filaments are powered via AC connected via a 10 ohm / 1 Watt resistor - switched to that design (maybe unnecessarily), which is why R17 is removed and the 10 ohm resistor spans from one pad of D3 to one pad of R17, there is jumper from the D4 pad to the non CT AC lead to connect that resistor to power. I removed D3 and D4 and connect the AC power to CT and the junction of D5 and D6. Neither is bad, but I do prefer the real one in most cases. The Big Muff is the one that is most different. A favorite among blues players, this pedal is at home anywhere the warmth and presence of overdriven tubes is needed. My original schematic matches this - but the wall wart CT transformer is hard to find so I converted to non CT wall wart. But in post, I think the real tube screamer was louder and the GT1000 Blues Drive may have had the tone turned up a little. Able to organically create the tone of a tube amp at the point of breakup, the Tube Driver has been loved by guitarists since its inception decades ago for that all-natural tone and feel.
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