Low Voltage Organ Overdrive with 12AT7 (ECC81)

It was 2010 I guess, I have been using my JCM800 preamp for distorting my KORG CX-3 compact organ (famous Hammond C3 clone, Manfred Mann plays it, too). But the sound was not as crispy as I intended it to be.

Then one day I stumbled across this project :

https://www.tube-town.net/diy/lov/lov02-peppershredder.html

The Peppershredder by D. Munzinger is a guitar distortion with two 12AT7 (ECC81) tubes that operates with an anode voltage of only 12V. Astonished by the possibility of such a thing I started playing with a Brimar 6060 tube that I had laying around (very close to a 12AT7). Heating as well as anode voltage was supplied by an old AT computer power supply.

Within half an hour I had a “one tube circuit” before me that could amplify (or at least buffer) the audio signal from my KORG CX-3 organ. And It got better: This crude tube preamp was easily overdriven by cranking up the volume knob on the organ.

I was amazed how good it sounded while it consists of yet so few parts. The rest of the evening/night I spent building the overdrive into a nice enclosure.

Find the schematics here: 12at7_overdrive.pdf

(there is a little blah blah in german along the schematic, nothing too important)

It is basically the first stage of the LoV Peppershredder with small modifications.