Here’s another in a line now of DOD pedal mods. For this FX55B, I decided to go for more of a BigMuff sound. Playing around with this pedal initially, I found it to be like most mass-produced distortion/fuzz effects. It had a very thin sound and that notorious volume drop that you may have heard on a high-school band’s first album. The lows were almost non-existent when the effect was engaged. I found the following schematic and, with a few simple changes, came out with a distortion pedal with considerable gain, massive lows, and a smoother, more rounded square wave.

Overall, the idea here was to get more from the pedal by employing some germanium to smooth out the harshness and to increase the overall output. The output is now considerably higher as long as the tone knob is set closer to 10 o’clock. At noon, the mixing is practically useless. At the 4 o’clock position, you get more of a thin, trash punk type of sound with an excessive noise floor. The sound sample demonstrates the effect with the tone set at about 10:30-11 and first contrasts the distortion setting. The third set shows off the tone below 10 o’clock. The last set shows what the tone does when you sweep through it.