Madbean Pedals Mysterioso

WE ARE EXTREMELY EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE THE 'NEW FOR 2025' COLLABORATION WITH MADBEAN PEDALS! Fantastic DIY pedal projects, now available as full or partial Small Bear kits!

Our Partial Kits include the PCB/PCB Set and all parts needed for the project, except you supply your own enclosure and knobs. 

Our Full Kit includes the PCB/PCB Set, all the parts, a drilled enclosure and knobs. 

You can always check out the MadBean Forum for more info-- a great resource! MadBean Pedals Forum

Overview

As overdrives go, the Blackstone Appliances® Mosfet Overdrive™ has always interested me. Probably because it was the first pedal I traced and it pushed me to get more interested in circuit design. The design itself shares some passing familiarity with other CD4049-based overdrives like the Tube Sound Fuzz (Red Llama), EHX Hot Tubes, ROG Double D and Mark Hammer’s Forty-Niner. But it is very much its own thing. The Mosfet Overdrive™ is a dual channel overdrive derived from a single circuit. Rather than doubling up on the parts, the channel switching is done by swapping between two sets of volume and drive controls, with the tone control being shared. Additionally, channel 1 has two different drive settings: CCW is more mids focused and CCW is fatter. The center position is the point of lowest gain (I don’t know of any other overdrive set up like this but I am sure there must be one or two). The Mysterioso is about 95% of the Mosfet Overdrive. I did include a few tweaks to the design that are my own preference for this effect. These include a tone bypass switch with options and reducing the two internal trimmers to one. Additionally, the stock reactive/buffer switch has been made external. This isn’t what I would call a “Plug N Play” type OD. It takes a little bit of tweaking to get it right for your gear and I will explain how to do that in the Notes section, as well as offer some mod suggestions. This is, at its core, a very mids focused overdrive and may not be for everyone. But, I’ve found some killer tones in it. Just a few months ago I got to play it through a Carr Mercury and it slayed with that amp and a Gibson DC!

Mysterioso Manual

Mysterioso Schematics