Electronic – Capacitor into resistor to ground

analogcircuit analysisfeedbackguitar-pedaloperational-amplifier

I recently started learning electronics on my own due to interest in audio effects because I play guitar so:

I thought I'd start out with distortion pedals, they seemed the simplest to begin with.

The schematic below is from a clone of the famous Boss OD-1 overdrive pedal.
I am getting a hold of the thing and starting to understand how it works but I've gotten quite stuck now, I can't find what the function is of a capacitor running into a resistor that goes to ground, as is the case of C3 and R5 here, just can't find it anywhere.

Any help on understanding this is really appreciated.

Greets, Nook

overdrive schematicvalues

Best Answer

IC1A intentionally is set to have high gain and it's a non-inverting amplifier like this: -

enter image description here

R5 in the OP's circuit is equivalent to R1 above.

However, it has two extra features that work together. The diodes in the OP's circuit heavily clip the guitar signal and this produces "wanted" distortion that can be adjusted by VR1. Note that the signal is clipped asymmetrically to provide a different type of characteristic "sound" compared to symmetrical clipping. The asymmetry means that R5 must then be capacitively connected (via C3) to stop the natural DC offset produced by the asymmetry causing the circuit not to work correctly i.e. it stops the output developing a significant DC offset that would tend to make clipping more or less symmetrical.