This pedal is a direct clone of the Dr. Boogey pedal. This pedal emulates the preamp section of a Dual Recifier Amp by Mesa. This is one of the go to amps for any metal guitar player. These amps are also very expensive.
FET emulation is essentially taking a tube amplifier and replacing each triode with a FET. FETs are significantly cheaper than tubes and work with much lower voltages. FETs also last longer than tubes. The overdrive characteristics of FETs clipping is different than tubes however. The clipping of FET, or any solid state device-width for that matter, is harsher than the smooth clipping of tube amps. Below is the schematic for the Dual Rectifier FET emulator called Dr.Boogey. You can very clearly see how similar the circuit is to a tube amp preamp stage.
Here you can see the rat’s nest of wires. Main controls are Treble, Mid, Bass, Gain, Volume. This pedal puts out a very loud signal. I have to keep the volume knobs set back fairly far to avoid saturating the preamp section of my amp.
The FETs are biased to 1/2 of the Vcc voltage.
The tone knobs have a nearly identical circuit as the Dual Rectifier’s tone section. This makes the pedal behave very close to a Dual Rectifier. This pedal works best with a 9V wall wart instead of a battery. This is because as the battery drains, there’s a voltage drop and this skews the bias of the FET transistors.
