The Exar DS-02 is a distortion pedal from Exar, a Polish pedal brand. The Guitar FX Layouts blog, which describes Exar as a maker with "some decent tones and lots of room for tweaking and trying things out," published a DIY layout for it in December 20221.
What it does
The DS-02 is a distortion pedal, the pedal category that clips the guitar signal harder than an overdrive but usually more cleanly than a fuzz. Beyond its effect type, published documentation for the DS-02 is thin: when the layout was posted, the blog's author noted "No demos around for this one either..."1. Players looking to hear the pedal before committing will find that harder than with better-documented designs.
The DIY layout and the tracing community
Most of what circulates about the DS-02 comes from the stripboard-building community. The Guitar FX Layouts blog posted a vero (stripboard) and tagboard layout for the pedal in December 2022, based on a circuit trace by VitaliiBobrov, whom the blog credits with doing "an amazing job in tracing Exar pedals"1. The same tracer's work covers other pedals in the Exar range, including the Exar MT-1 Metal and the Exar MM-04 Moon Metal1.
The blog's author also passed along a modification suggestion for builders: "Once again, try to tweak the values at the inverting input to ground."1. That is a common way to reshape the gain and frequency response of an op-amp-based distortion, and it is the kind of tweak the layout format makes easy to try.
The DS-02 layout was posted without a verification tag at the time of publication, and no sound demos were available then either1. Builders should treat it as a layout without a confirmed build report, unlike some other Exar layouts on the same blog.
Where the DS-02 sits in the Exar range
Exar built a small family of dirt pedals that the tracing community has worked through one by one: the DS-02 for distortion, the Exar HR-03 Hammer, and the metal-oriented MT-1 and MM-041. For players interested in the brand, the traced layouts are the main public record of how these circuits are put together.
Videos
Parlee
Questions
Is there a DIY layout for the Exar DS-02?
Yes. The Guitar FX Layouts blog published a vero (stripboard) and tagboard layout for the DS-02 in December 2022, based on a trace by VitaliiBobrov, who has traced several other Exar pedals for the same blog. The author also suggests tweaking the resistor values at the inverting input to ground as a way to alter the circuit.
Are there any demos of the Exar DS-02?
When the stripboard layout was posted in December 2022, the blog's author noted there were no demos around for the pedal. That makes the DS-02 one of the harder Exar pedals to hear before building or buying.
Sources (1)
- Guitar FX Layouts: Exar DS-02 Distortion, Guitar FX Layouts (tagboardeffects.blogspot.com), 2022-12-07
