Blaster and Unity Gain Buffer
The DGN Blaster and Buffer are faithful recreations of the two guitar circuits made famous by Jerry Garcia. Ive taken these classic circuits and modernized them with ultra compact PCB construction. You still get the great tone of individual parts stuffed and soldered onto a circuit board, but the footprints are very compact and will fit into just about any electronics cavity.
The Blaster Circuit gives you the tone of early Jerry, Alligator and Wolf. When engaged, it will give you everything from a very subtle boost to over the top amp pushing overdrive gain. This is all accomplished with the on board multi turn trimmer. It take a lot of turns to make a little difference in gain level, so just keep turning!! I chose this style trimmer because it's much easier to dial in the right amount of gain for you!! When engaged you'll notice more pleasing presence in your tone as well as a little mid bump. Flip this on in the middle position and its instant Jerry tone. Use it with humbuckers in the neck or bridge position to add more output and definition to your tone. Theres no wrong way to use the blaster. Experiment and have fun!!
The Buffer Circuit, aka Unity Gain Buffer gives you the tone of later Jerry, Tiger and Rosebud. The buffer won't change your tone the way you think it will. The buffer changes the impedance of the output of your guitar. With this change of impedance, the Buffer will drive signal over extremely long lengths of cable without breaking a sweat. Why is this significant? When Jerry started utilizing the On Board Effects Loop, or "OBEL" for short, this required long cable runs from guitar to pedals, back to guitar and then out to the amp. Guitar cables have a certain amount of capacitance and the longer the cable is, the more treble loss you get. This can make your guitar signal lose presence and clarity. Just compare a short 6 foot cable to a very long coil cable and you'll see exactly what Im talking about. The buffer changes the guitars output impedance which basically takes the cable capacitance out of the equation. That means you get all of that sparkly presence and treble back in your guitar signal that the cables were taking away. Pretty cool!!