My intention was to show newcomers how to make a simple distortion using the resources that I’m familiar with. The two distortions in my example were taken directly from the Electro-Smith examples. The Daisy can be intimidating to newcomers/beginners and I think it’s important to get peoples feet wet and interested in what it can produce.
I’m not familiar with the tanh function or how it ties into distortion. Perhaps you can make an example us newbies can go off of? It would be interesting to hear the differences.
o5akafeeva:
That’s an awesome plot! I may have to pump in to Audacity and get some plots, too! My guess for the source of noise/hiss is either your preamp or buffer, the daisy itself, or your buffer has a higher gain than mine and the gain value in the code is way too high. Could be other things like noise induced from your guitar cable or pickups, power supply for your Seed, or the guitar outputs a much higher signal than mine. antisin is also correct by saying that the noise floor is significantly raised for this effect so it will amplify problems. The gain applies not just the guitar signal, but the noise as well. In a perfect world, there would be no noise. There are certainly better ways to do distortion than a hard clip.
As I mentioned before, I’m using a pedalpcb Terrarium as a buffer and controls. I think it’s very important you have a buffer or else you get a ton of noise. If you aren’t really into DIY analog electronics, I believe tuner pedals almost always have buffers built in. My terrarium buffer op-amp is currently a LM741, but I may put in a TL072 soon. I get a little noise, which is common for any distortion effect, but not nearly as much as the sample you provided.