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 it when you’ve got it dialed in just right but turn the drive up and, to my ears, things start getting weird. The mid sweetness gives way to a phasey, odd-harmonic dominated grind that I’ve never particularly liked.
I really do love the character of the circuit, though. I just don’t like asking it to do much more than the one thing I think it’s great at.
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, not just more but better gain.. 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. It’s pretty good where it is.
WHY GREEN HELL?
I think the Tube Screamer is a special kind of hell for pedal builders.
It’s one of the most recognizable overdrive circuits ever made. Everything gets compared to it. Everybody has an opinion about it. Everyone seems to want their own version of it.
And there are already so many variations out there that trying to make another one actually worth making feels like a pretty monumental task.
I didn’t want to build a green pedal with a few resistor changes and different set of clipping diodes and call it new.
I wanted to keep the part I thought was special, prevent the things that drove me nuts, and introduce something new and unique without losing the character that made the circuit matter in the first place.
The Expander ended up being the answer.
By generating additional harmonic content before the overdrive stage and adding another gain stage after it, Green Hell lets the classic circuit live where I think it sounds best while everything around it gets increasingly unruly.
All the cool stuff is still there.
There’s just more harmonic texture, more gain, more output, and more ways to make the whole thing misbehave.
A little familiar, a little ridiculous, and capable of getting pretty nasty.
Welcome to Green Hell.
– Charles Henry
TUBE SCREAMER is a registered trademark of Hoshino Gakki Co., Ltd. Green Hell is an independent Silktone product and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Hoshino Gakki or Ibanez.
