ShortScale.org

I've been looking for something interesting to do with my Jaguar's never used tone circuit recently and noticed I have a habit of dialling in a teeny tiny bit of overdrive basically all the time.

But what if the overdrive was coming from inside the guitar?

oh boy it's passive overdrive. Either you spend too much money on a black ice or you go on ebay and get some schottky diodes for a couple of quid. I went with the latter, bought some BAT41s and rewired the tone switch so all it does is switch the diodes in and out of circuit.

Quickie audio demo:

http://irc.alligatr.co.uk/bat41s.mp3

Neck normal, then w/ overdrive, bridge normal, w/ overdrive, then just some quick toggling of the switch so you can hear the difference more clearly.
Jaguar w/ AVRI pickups into interface into guitar rig.

It's pretty subtle (higher output pickups or a diode with a lower forward voltage would make it more pronounced) and can sound a bit farty, but I think it's a neat thing to have & definitely wasn't something that was on my radar until I randomly came across some stuff about the black ice.

Nifty!

Even if it sounds a bit blarpy on its own, it's the sort of thing that could work super well going into another gain source for a different kind of texture on the fly.

Watching a Black Ice demo (sounds pretty much the same), and having it go into a slightly crunchy amp defo gives it that kinda oldskool GRUNT fuzz you get from totally diming your Sears amp-in-case when your mom's out of the house at her book club/AA meeting

Works well.

Cool.

I was considering something on-board in the SG to push the Orange, instead of a boost pedal. But I think I'd probably be looking more towards an EMG Afterburner or similar.