The guitar pedal, named the Hard Bargain, is a unique blend of engineering and aesthetics. The idea for this pedal originated from the need for versatile tone controls in overdrive/distortion/fuzz pedals. The Hard Bargain offers two controls – one for Bass/Treble balance and another for mid-range Cut/Boost. The tone controls are designed using a rarely-used “Tilt” control for Bass/Treble balance and a Baxandall-type Mid control for mid-range Cut/Boost.

The distortion stage of the Hard Bargain is designed to provide a fairly hard distortion, offering plenty of distortion harmonics for the tone control to work with. The distortion is created using an op-amp providing gain with diodes afterwards to hard-clip the signal. The pedal starts with a high impedance input buffer, followed by a variable-gain drive stage. The frequency response of this stage is controlled by capacitors that act as highpass and lowpass filters.

The signal clipping in the Hard Bargain is achieved through two sets of diodes, one set pointing down and the other set pointing up, to clip negative and positive peaks of the waveform. Three diodes are used to boost the output level. The choice of diodes is left open, offering flexibility in achieving desired sound effects. The final version of the pedal includes an output buffer after the volume control to prevent interaction with subsequent circuits and provide a solid, low impedance drive.

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