ANDROMEDA NATURAL OVERDRIVE
6
BUILD NOTES
Bass Control
Most drive pedals will cut bass before clipping the signal. The classic benchmark is the Tube Screamer’s
720Hz filter, and most drive pedals are somewhere in this range.
The stock ODR-1 does not have very much bass-cut, and so in most rigs, it has an enormous low end
that doesn’t work very well. This is the biggest complaint about the circuit and is the fatal flaw in an
otherwise exceptional design.
Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to solve. By adding a Bass control to allow the bass to be cut down to
reasonable levels, the Andromeda becomes an incredibly usable drive effect. And with the knob all the
way up, it’s exactly like the stock ODR-1 circuit.
If for some reason you do want to leave off this control, you can jumper pins 2 and 3 of the Bass pot to
eliminate it entirely.
Clipping Diodes
The ODR-1 circuit uses both soft clipping diodes (op-amp feedback) and hard clipping diodes (signal to
ground). The hard clipping diodes clip the signal pretty aggressively, and as a result, they remove some of
the character of the effect.
The Andromeda has been modified to have two extra diodes, D6 and D7, in series with the existing hard-
clipping diodes. It’s recommended to use these. However, they are not on a switch that allows them to
be toggled in and out, so they can’t be added and removed on a whim.
If you don’t want to use the additional diodes, you can either run jumper wires across them or you can
just bridge the two jumper pads to the immediate left of D7.
