There's a cool kuwento included on one of the above links, which has Paul Cochrane telling how the TIM developed. Thanks for it. Here's the quote:
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PaulCo
Junior Member
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The Tim/timmy pedals are not clones of anything that I know of. Simple circuit using common parts for sure, but the design was not based on anything.
I made it back in 1997. It started out as a simple opamp boost for my plexi. If pushed hard it would get into nasty rail distortion, so i put limiting diodes in to stop that. That's the only thing it has in common with a ts type of pedal - diode clampers. It didn't come from a TS. It came from basic electronic theory. It would still distort, but it wasn't so nasty so then I decided to make it into an od also.
It had to still be able to be a flat booster, so I had to think about how to shape the signal for good clipping while still being able to be set flat. What I came up with is a simple tone control setup that was split into different areas of the circuit. Up until then anything I'd ever seen had the tone controls in the same spot.
The pre clipping bass control was designed to mimic the response of blending channels on a plexi. It's a variable shelf EQ. Simple, but nothing I'd seen in anything diy or pro. This let the pedal have a flat low end for the clean stuff while letting me roll off the bottom when getting the gain going. The treble control came after the distortion. It's a simple variable 1st order filter. i did this so i could have all the treble there for the clean stuff while being able to roll out the highs when cranking. It does not use an active boost/cut high end shelf like a screamer. To make up for the loss of output level due to the clamps I used the second half of the amp to give the output a flat 6db boost.
While it's a simple circuit it's not a clone of anything. It's a bunch of things that i did to reach a goal I had. It did not come about from modding/tweaking anything. I did not try to make a better "something".
Have builders flat out cloned stuff? Sure, but not in this case. I've never gooped it, and I've never misled people about the design. I've also tried to keep it as cheap as I could so poor musicians could afford it. Up until last June the pedal was $105 including shipping and paypal fees. Now it's $129. I hated to raise the price, but I wasn't even making half of what it cost to build because of the increase in parts and shipping costs.
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