Wednesday 2 May 2012

Bunch of pedals in one post.

I fear I will not have time to do justice to every build I have done.

Here are a few I have made for other people recently.

1 - Ju Ju Juice

This is a clone of the Sustain Punch Creamy Dreamer. Jude from the band To The Bones wanted something to replace her MXR distortion plus, and this fits the bill nicely. She borrowed my Dreamer and loved it, so I made her a replacement for keeps!

The case is a red Hammond pre-fabbed one, and I used toner transfer for the graphics. I love the understated look, and it reminds me of older D*A*M stompboxes.

Guts:


Sounds absolutely banging and looks beautiful. Jude was totally stoked with it.



2 - Hot Cake (aka Flapjack)

I have an ongoing relationship with an amazing guitarist called Gee who sadly lives in London. Otherwise Im sure Id pester him a lot more. Anyway, I have built a bunch of pedals for him. This is the latest one. Its a hotcake, built on a nice pre-fabbed board from a member of the Madbean community. This build was also using a pre-coloured Hammond case, this time light grey.

Gee just wanted my logos on it, otherwise plain, and a white LED. So I obliged! Also I used a 3PDT footswitch board in this build, which makes things look oh-so-professional. Sounds super nice. Geek out moment - I managed to source some vintage rare RCA 741 "tin can" IC chips, which are perfect for this project!

 Inside
Outside


3 - DOD overdrive/preamp 250

Another one for Gee. Cant imagine why anyone would pay £200 odd for one of these on the vintage market, but apparently they do. I managed to source a reproduction PCB, as well as a vintage RCA opamp for this build. There is very little to it, but its sounds so nice. I was actually remiss to part with this. LOADS of clean boost on tap, and whacking the gain gives a wonderful open crunch. Gee is a lucky guy. Damn him ;) Ah well I have too many pedals and doing this helps fund some of my own experiments.

 Pretty simple this one. Again it used the footswitch board.
This time a simple silver case and yellow LED.


 4 - 1983 Boss CE-2 clone

This is one for myself. Using the version 3 Pork Barrell project PCB from Madbean. This is a stripped down chorus (none of the mods of the version 2 which I have also built). It features a rate LED which blinks in time with the speed of the chorus. Sounds so nice, instant Smiths. Instant 80s. Hence the name. Also my birth year. I love this pedal so bad. Features a vintage Panasonic MN3007 / MN3101 bucket brigade chipset. Perfect. This one is a pretty densely populated PCB, akin to the Deluxe Memory Man PCB.
And for the outside I kept it simple. Press n Peel blue leaves a nice blue tinge which can be removed but I felt it worked well with the colourscheme :) Coulda been better aligned on the Gigahearts sign but nevermind ;)
5 - WEM project V

 Ok lets end on another Vero project. I met up with a chap called Seb from up and coming band Young British Artists. He was keen to get a fuzz pedal built and was particularly in love with the sound acheived by Brian Eno on his seminal recording Here Come the Warm Jets. Turns out he used a WEM project V.

This is an 8 transistor fuzz pedal (!!) Luckily and by coincidence, this was being traced on FSB at the time, and a vero layout was produced. I subsequently Improved the vero for my own use. This is a great pedal, with lots of fuzz tones achievable from muffy tones to tonebender or fuzz face types. You can also get some nice abrupt sustain for broken speaker type sounds.

Overall, bonkers and lovely. This was housed up in an oversize case, something Seb wanted but the build itself almost necessitated. Keen eyed will see a cute trimmer used for the LED brightness so it can be set to taste.
The outside is awaiting a contribution from a local artist, so for now it looks like this. I like the vintage type chicken head knobs on this one :)

2 comments:

  1. Pedal reverb is something that I want to know in detail as my involvement with guitar is crossing an adolescent stage. Your blog title "How not to make pedal" is pretty curious. So it leads my inner urge to go through to have information on pros and cons of your write up. Your cloning product Ju Ju Juice is obviously good one and hopefully well matched with tone. The hot cake that you mentioned looks great in respect of view on both sides. Fuzz tones that gives complex overtone and lead the signal to a square wave.Content is pretty good one as well as informative. Thanks
    http://musicaladvisors.com/best-reverb-pedal

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  2. Hey, I'm very interested in the WEM Project V too. Do you have any sound clips of it? And would you consider making another?

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