bk butler tube driver into overdriven amp

peavey_xxl posted a link to the scheme on the forum, which he said someone wh

Em drive schematic This is a really simple circuit looking at the board, but we didn't have a picture of the back and on the bread plate my designs didn't look right, so I put it away for a while until I could look at the unit myself or at least a decent picture of the back of the board.

So, it could be argued that yes, the tube's existence is purely a gimmick, but I'd like to give at least Butler the benefit of the doubt, in that he probably thought he had found a different way of getting distortion from a pedal. I personally realized just how different the effect of the tube in these pedals was when I subbed in an extremely microphonic 12AU7, that was otherwise completely useless for any other task, and I could hammer on the pedal enclosure, and not get even the slightest microphonic sound out of it. While it may not be fair to say that starved plate designs are equivalent to diode clipping, IMO it's totally accurate to say that starved plate tube sonics have mostly nothing in common with what's going on internally, at higher voltages, inside an amp. And - the actual drive part in these boxes is solid state.

If you just stop and think about it, if running a pair of triodes at 12VDC or less is all that it took to get real overdriven tube tones, it would make things a lot simpler for tube amp builders. I haven't touched my 'real tube' pedal in years, and I was never really that impressed by it. The English Muff'n uses close to 300VDC for the B+ and IMO, the response from this pedal is a lot more organic and 'amp like' compared to starved plate tube designs, I've tried. I've come to really think of some of these starved plate designs more as a gimmick to sell more pedals, because there's a tube in there, and sending your guitar signal through a tube makes it 'Toob-y' sounding right? The stage will have less 'headroom' (good thing for a drive pedal, maybe, but it hurts dynamic and 'touch' response, IMO.) To me, starved plate tubes start to sound much like the diode clipping, we're trying to avoid by using tubes in the first place. The issue is starved plate tubes don't behave or sound like tubes with high voltages on the plates.

I'm going to disagree with this to a degree.īeing 'starved plate' it would actually change the tone more compared to a high voltage setup.

Bk butler tube driver into overdriven amp