Silktone is back with a fresh take on a classic. Green Hell takes what you love about the classic Screamer circuit and "wraps" it in some well-thought out gain staging before and after to give a dynamic and complex overdrive with lots of possibilities!

Builder Notes :

I only ever liked one setting on the famous green overdrive. So I built a whole pedal around it.

I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Tube Screamer. There's something really special about that focused, chewy, mid-forward overdrive when you've got it dialed in just right.

But turn the drive up and, to my ears, things start getting weird. The sweetness gives way to a phasey, odd-harmonic dominated grind that I've never particularly liked.

The funny thing is, I really do love the character of the circuit. I just don't like asking it to do much more than the one thing I think it's great at. And I didn't want to "fix" it by changing the clipping diode arrangement and turning it into something else.

So I started experimenting with a Tube Screamer and our Expander side by side on my pedalboard, using the Expander to solve the things that bothered me while trying to leave the heart of the classic green circuit alone. Eventually it clicked:

Stop asking the Tube Screamer stage to make all the distortion.
Instead, I wrapped it in the harmonic architecture of the Expander and a new thing was born.

A CLASSIC GREEN HEART. EXPANDED.

At the center of Green Hell is the classic mid-focused overdrive circuit, with the character of the clipping stage left intact. What's different is how it gets hit and what happens afterward. Before the signal even reaches the overdrive stage, it passes through a JFET-based second-harmonic generator derived from the Expander. That's where the Gain control does its thing, adding body, texture, and progressively
richer harmonic content. The gain and output of the overdrive heart itself is essentially fixed where I always liked it. Its output is then set to hit another JFET stage hard, voiced to behave more like smashing the first tube in an
amplifier. Making a tube scream, if you will. That's also where the final Level control lives.. post smashed tube stage a-la expander.

So instead of simply turning up the drive on the core circuit and getting more and more of the same distortion, Green Hell builds gain and complexity around it. That's really the whole idea.

You still get the bite, compression, and midrange push that make this kind of overdrive so useful, but the pedal reacts very differently when you turn the gain up. Things get thicker, more colorful, and a lot more harmonically complex instead of just collapsing further into the clipping stage. There's way more gain available, a lot more output on tap, and a much wider range of useful tones. It's still unmistakably rooted in that classic green circuit. There's just a whole lot more happening around it.

THREE WAYS INTO HELL
The three-way Voice switch takes the circuit in three pretty different directions.
I — CLASSIC
The most traditional voice. Tight, focused, mid-forward, and closest to the sound that started the whole thing.
The difference is everything happening around it. You get the extra harmonic complexity from the input stage, the additional saturation from the output JFET, more available gain, and a much bigger output ceiling.

II — MID MONSTER
This one started out as me basically trolling the whole mid-hump thing.
I turned the op-amp stage into a resonant amplifier, exaggerating that famous midrange peak into something much more extreme while adding a healthy bump in gain.

I thought this would be funny but it ended up being really fun too.
It's aggressive, vocal, cutting, and completely unapologetic about what it is. If the classic green mid hump is already too much for you, this mode is absolutely not here to help.

III — FAT
A bigger, heavier version of the classic voice with more gain and some of the low end brought back into the circuit.
An easily accessible internal trim pot lets you decide exactly how much bass gets restored. You can add just enough for a little extra body or push it considerably further if you want something much fatter.

Set it where you like it and forget about it. Or don't. That's why I made it easy to get to.