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Post by blindwilly3fingers on Sept 23, 2021 21:04:28 GMT
He is pretty honest MartinB he does say there is no pedal that can't be cloned. He could say the Chinese stuff is rubbish and promote his own stuff but he appears to like we get the choice of cheap pedals against the expensive stuff.
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jml77
Harley Benton Club Junior Member
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Post by jml77 on Nov 20, 2021 10:21:17 GMT
The Tai Chi, either the Joyo or Horse (Kmise?) seems to be a clone of the Hermida Zendrive, or at least very similar. I was looking at the Caline Mellow drive and the Enchanted drive, hyped as Dumble sound in a box, and I'm fairly sure the Mellow Drive is another Zendrive clone.
The schematics I've seen look slightly different, in that some show a slightly different arrangement of diodes in the feedback loop of the op-amp. They nearly all have Mosfets configured to use the body diode in series with at least one germanium, a 1n34a usually. It should be nice and smooth sounding. The Voice control would seem to lower or raise the bass frequency a little, and lower or raise the gain a fraction, but as the Op-amp is configured for lots of gain then this change in gain wouldn't be that noticeable. (Edit to clarify:- The voice control gain reduction is separate from the Gain/drive control which has a large gain range, hence the loss from using the voice control won't be that noticeable. )
Just another tweaked Tube-screamer really.
Still it's nice to have some buying options, the joyo and caline cases look better made, and more likely to survive lots of stomping.
(The Caline Enchanted drive is quite different, cascaded Jfet Mu-amp stages with a big muff style tone control, if the schematics are to be believed. Not sure what it's a clone of. If you like Jfet overdrive go for this one, smooth overdrive touch sensitive but Jfets tend to get a little fuzzy and if not careful a bit spitty and splatty when they're excessively overdriven)
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Post by schwimbob on Aug 13, 2022 12:47:35 GMT
I just got a Horse Tai Chi and think it is a good sounding pedal (especially at the sale price it was listed at). It sounds a lot like other Zen Drive clones that are (or have been) available - such as the Tomsline Dumbler, the Rowin Dumbler, the 3PDT Zentone, etc. If you like the Zen Drive type sound, you will probably like the Horse Tai Chi. It doesn't have much gain available, so if you have low output pickups, you might need to use a boost pedal in front of the Tai Chi to get a decent amount of overdrive.
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Post by schwimbob on Aug 13, 2022 12:50:43 GMT
I should say in regards to my comment about low output pickups maybe needing a boost pedal, I was thinking more of low output single coil pickups. PAF style humbuckers have enough output to produce a good overdrive sound with the pedal with no boost pedal needed.
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