The Tone Of The Plexi
Yet again a distortion effect that aims to sound like a Marshall Plexi. Today we have a variation of the popular Plexitone from Carl Martin: Madbean’s Boneyard II. How does it sound? Pretty good :) It has the “marshallesque” character, a bit nasal, rich in mids, very sensitive to picking dynamics. A bit on the darker side, I wouldn’t turn the tone pot lower than 12 o’clock. The texture of the distortion is not very rough. Not very smooth either, I wouldn’t call it “liquid-like”, but also not as rough as many fuzzboxes. For me turning the Crunch pot all the way up is not quite enough, but one can replace that pot or push the input of the pedal with a booster. By the way: the pedal likes being pushed very much, just like a good tube amp. I would recommend to give it a try to anyone looking for marshall tones in a pedal.
Contrary to the original Madbean’s version only has +/- 9V power for the active parts (the original has +/- 12V), but it still has enough headroom. The distortion is mainly done by a symmetrical LED soft-clipping arrangement. The architecture is a fairly standard opamp based circuit. According to Madbean the effect could oscillate at higher gains, to avoid that he recommends to lower the Crunch pot to 50k. I would rather increase it to 250k. Another possible mod is to replace one of the LEDs to a jumper to achieve a bit higher compression and distortion and also my favourite assymmetrical clipping arrangement.
You can find the documentation under the Projects menu.
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