Great idea! I'm already envisioning a board of individual pedals which are all discrete stages - couple of gain stages, couple of eqs, some clipping diodes... Kinda build your own pedal in a single pedal board.

I really love how you cater to visual learners and people who don't have much (if any) electrical training. I also love how you think that through-mount diodes are "really tiny." Surface Mount components almost made me give up on electronics repair.

I've been looking for this exact thing.

I’ve been messing with passive diode pedals recently. If you put a buffered pedal in front of it you don’t have as much of a volume drop and it’s less muddy and fuzzy with the buffer. More crunch. And if you run a boost into it you can get a dynamic drive sound.

If you want to make it a bit cheaper you don't really need a 3PDT foot switch. A simple SPST foot switch will do (could even use a bedside lamp switch to be uber-cheap. But don't stomp on it too hard though!) Just wire the diode pair between the signal lugs of the jack sockets and a parallel path through the switch between the same. When the switch is off, the only path for the signal is through the diodes. When it's on, the diodes are shorted, and therefore totally bypassed. The other thing you could do if you stick with the 3PDT switch is replace that little wire with a resistor or preset pot, That way you can volume match the clipped and un-clipped signal. Of course there will still be an insertion loss, but this can be compensated for with more gain downstream.

Amazing!!!

One of my favourite new channels. I've been building gor a while now, but I still enjoy what you bring to the table. One minor correction though, at 5.15, you add a small jumper wire to the footswitch. You state that it doesn't need to have plastic insulation, this is true, however, you are using metal bodied jacks, ground connection is made to the body of the enclosure, your wire touches the body, it would short all signal to ground, if it wasn't covered in plastic. Really sorry, because your content is excellent. Can you edit your voice out of that part?

Dads computer! Lol

Super cool! Thanks for posting. My new favorite channel. How would you add an LED light?

I'm really confused about what this does to the signal. I expected it to be connected to the ground to drain excessive voltage and clipping the signal from the top (and bottom for negative voltages) as usual. In this setup, it seems to clip the middle section of the signal. If the voltage is low, no current can flow and it remains at 0 on the output until the forward voltage of the diode is reached and then it should reproduce everything above more or less faithfully minus the forward voltage.

nice. can you think of a diode that offers a 'cleanish' clipping so it's almost like a passive compressor? trying to think of something subtle as an always on effect

Interesting.

Wait could I also do this with caps? And what will it do?:]

could you put this in a guitar

Or just add the diodes and a mini toggle to any or all your existing pedals like every other pedal builder on earth has been doing for the last 15 years!!