Did a mod to my MXR noise gate tonight.
I’ve not owned a noise gate since the early 90s in my wannabe Helmet days.
I picked up a 1980 MXR Noise Gate Line driver for $40 on ebay about a month ago. Neat. I figure if I don’t like it, I can put it up with a $75 BIN and make a profit.
I plugged it in at full volume. It works great! Much better than my old DOD gate. I was quite surprised.
The “Line Driver” part is hilarious. The final part of the circuit is a 741 opamp buffer. There is an XLR out on the side. However, the XRL hot is just hooked to the 1/4″ out hot connection. The XLR minus and ground are just connected together. That’s just silly. It’s just a high current, unbalanced signal.
It seems to lose a bit of low end and level, but it doesn’t sound bad; nothing you couldn’t EQ out. The bypass isn’t a bypass in the traditional sense. When you turn the pedal off, that just grounds out a part of the gating circuit so that the gate stays full open.
Anyway, I’m surprised by how nice it sounds! but tonight I decided to change a couple caps to see if it would improve the sound.
Replaced the caps noted above with .1uf. It lets more low end through than it previously did. I didn’t really run the numbers, but it does sound a little better
I now actually like the buffered signal (with the pedal on or off) more than a true bypassed signal.
Cheers!
A lot of the circuitry jargon is over my head (actually it all is), but this seems really interesting. You get anything usable running this after a fuzz? Or would a gate function differently stacked than it would as part of the same circuit of a fuzz?