Creating A Functioning Overdrive
For this post I wanted to go ahead and build something more interesting. Something that will significantly alter the sound of the guitar. As of the last post, I have a functioning volume slider that I can use to change the volume of my audio input and play it back. Now I would like to try something similar to changing the volume, but something a little more complex. The perfect effect for this purpose is overdrive/distortion. Distortion is an effect that guitar players frequently use to make their guitar sound more powerful. Most guitar amplifiers sold today come with some kind of overdrive channel that can be used separate from the clean input sound. In the realm of analog amplifiers this distortion is caused by, simply put, the signal being amplified beyond the tolerance of the equipment. Sound travels in waves, and amplifying it, or changing its amplitude, just causes the size of the peaks and the troughs of the...