Ibanez Sonic Distortion is one of the most famous distortion effects. It is also one of my favorite effects. The sound it produces is warm and thick sounding, great for rock and alternative music. Unlike other distortions out there, the tone control of this distortion is more of a bass rather than treble.
There are plenty of schematic diagrams on the internet so if you have knowledge in electronics, you can easily build one. I build one myself way back when I was in college. I made my own version of the PCB design to make the 3PDT switch attached to the PCB because there are no PCB design out there that arranged like that.
Circuit
The circuit is simple and straight forward. It is composed of 3 sections, input buffer, clipper and tone control. I added the buffer circuit on the output to get used of the unused opamp of TL072.
(UPDATE: I forgot to connect pull-up resistor and a capacitor on the input of the output buffer IC1A. Sorry! My Bad! )
PCB Layout
PCB layout size is 1 layer 5cm by 5cm.
Simulation
For the simulation, I used simetrix – an easy to use free simulation software. Thanks to this simulation software, I spotted one mistake on my output buffer design. I forgot to add a pull up resistor on the input of the buffer to the half VCC node. This is to prevent the input voltage to swing to negative voltage because the supply source is battery so the output can’t go below the negative voltage of the battery.
Simulation model:
Simulation result:
