Not Everything Goes to Plan

I wake up, clean myself up, and grabbed some caffeine, and made my way to m5 to begin another day of endlessly devoting myself to theorems and laws. Except wait… TODAY IS MAKERDAY!

For last weekend’s Makerday, I decided to create a distortion pedal by repurposing the schematic for an mxr dist+. Things seemed to go well at first, I made the schematic in LTspice and ran the simulation, achieving the exact results I was looking for. That being a pretty substantially clipped sine wave, which was supposed to imitate the input of a guitar’s frequency.

Credit to https://barbarach.com for providing the right schematic reference for my use case

As you can see we wave the test input wave and the clipped and then amplified output

Now, everything looks great doesn’t it? That’s exactly what I thought until I actually breadboarded the circuit and came across many issues. First was identifying whether or not the issue relied on the circuit itself, maybe I missed something within my circuit schematic. After checking once more in my simulation I still haven’t found anything wrong. My good friend Alex Reineke attempted to aid me in this issue, and we got relatively far in confirming that the circuit itself works as intended, but there must’ve been an issue in translating the schematic to the breadboard.

Even though this project was technically a fail and the circuit never came to be, I learned a lot more about op amp circuits and using LTspice (thanks to Alex). I will be using this knowledge in my own digital audio effect processor project for this upcoming Circuits and Code! Make sure to keep those eyes peeled, because I won’t be giving up as easily this time!

Want to work on similar projects such as this? Definitely consider stopping by our Makerday every Saturday (excluding holidays) and make something with you very own hands!

See you,

Raffy Landestoy

Computer Engineering 2028

30 March 2026