Diode clipping circuit

[saturated]

I was reading about this today and became very interested in it.  Some old posts one of the big dogs here was fussing about fender saying they don't know how to make distortion all they do is diode clipping.  So I immediately took notice and said hey I definitely want to check this out  Also it's right there with the other stuff I have been doing 

So I was at work and I wanted to know how to make a sin wave with the points chopped off like a sin wave with flat peaks

I always have old books at work to look at and of course I easily could have looked it up online....but I said why don't you try to come up with something based on what you have been doing and learning 

And honestly I didn't have much

About the best I could do was maybe use zener diodes in parallel maybe but I figured there was a way using ordinary diodes

I also figured it would help to get some capacitors involved but honestly my head is still spinning from trying to grasp all that they do 

So I thought about the diode limiter experiment I did and thought well you just need some voltage remaining so you'll have some peaks and then maybe have the diodes in parallel so I get the positive and negative and yes I was pretty much guessing like well I'll build it and see what happens

So I got off work and had to go mow and pick up two bags of pine needles  got back and even before showering thought dude just try it so guess what

Input

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And output

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And yeah it's pretty ugly I wanted some nice peaks with the tips cut flat.

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I think the resistors are 10k maybe I can try different values but I think it actually works   

But idk here are the two channels together

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[g1]

If you want more amplitude before clipping, add more diodes in series. 
Also, try just clipping the top alone (or bottom), which is what you might find in some tube amp stages.  We don't always get a nice symmetrical waveform, nor do we always want it.