# Roland Double Beat



## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

I'm working on a 12-fuzzes-in-one-rack unit, and one of the circuits I decided to clone was the Roland Double Beat. This is originally a wah-fuzz unit, but I just cloned the fuzz part. You can hear a very good example here: ROLAND AD-50 DOUBLE BEAT FUZZ/WAH PEDAL AUDIO DEMONSTRATION - YouTube After trying mine out, I suspect that a big part of what you hear in the video is amp overdrive. But still, that's a nice tone, whether produced by the pedal alone or the amp+pedal and flawlessly mic'd.

The unit didn't have a tone control, as such, but a tone-selector, which picked between 3 different sounds that they labelled sine, square and triangle, but which likely are nothing of the sort, just three fairly different sounds.

Since I would have to use a rotary switch as tone-selector anyway, I figured I'd use a 6-position switch and add 3 more tone presets. My mods to the circuit are shown below. Presets A, B, and C are stock. D is a 2-pole lowpass filter set to a rolloff around 2.4khz for a more vocal tone. E introduces some crossover distortion (i.e., clipping the "sides" of the waveform, instead of just the top and bottom). F produces a midscoop for big bottom with sizzle on top, similar to the Univox Superfuzz, and a variety of Shin-Ei fuzzes. So,there are essentially 6 qualitatively different-sounding fuzzes from the one box.

Nice sounding unit. Glad I made it. If you can find an original or clone, snag it. If you know how to build, try making one for yourself. Worthwhile.


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