I want to create an guitar distortion effect.
What I want is a unity gain buffer op-amp that clips the signal.
In the drawing below there is a circuit found on this forum here
which will clip a very low voltage (~200mV) signal.
However it will only clip at a particular voltage. What if you need (as I do) to clip simply the peaks off every wave?
I could provide some sort of rectified average peak of the input signal int 'mclamp' and 'clamp' such that the clamping voltage roughly followed the input signal as it rises and falls. For this I would presumably use some sort of 'ideal' rectifier (because of the 0.7 breakdown voltage of a diode bridge).
First.. is there an IC that will do this that anyone knows of?
And secondly.. Is what I'm proposing viable?
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Best Answer
Here's a partial solution that you could combine with the previous circuit. This circuit differentiates the input signal in order to locate where the peaks are, and then uses a set of sample/hold circuits to capture the values of those peaks. The outputs of this circuit could be used (with some voltage dividers) to set the clipping thresholds to some fraction of the previous peak's value. Not exactly what you asked for, but probably about as close as you can get with analog hardware.
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab