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First of all, that's one of the coolest looking boxes I've ever seen!

From the description, it does appear to be intended as more of a full-range general purpose amplifier, so PA or music rather than instrumentation. I would guess it would sound pretty awful on guitar. I wouldn't salivate too much over the tone!

Wow, this is next-level!! The polished enclosure just pulls everything together.

I would have envisioned this one with a soft touch, too.  I really dig Aion's new boards but that power cap and diode on the foot board does make the mixing and matching more complicated.

I'm working on a relay bypass module... but as usual there are a few engineering puzzles I've concocted for myself that I need to solve. I've got some innovative ideas though and hopefully it'll be something I can do later this year, backwards compatible with most of the existing boards.

That said, typically all the parts on the bypass PCBs are non-essential and can either be omitted or wired off-board (LED, polarity protection and power filter resistors & caps) or replaced by existing relay modules. The only exceptions are ones with buffered bypass like the Klon and Cornish-based ones that do have a few resistors from the main circuit on the bypass board.

Yep.

I recommend using 2x and 4X 1N914 for the two switch positions in each spot. (meaning jumper 2 of the 4 diode outlines) The newer Cerulean makes this the default, so you can reference the docs for that if it helps clarify.

Pfizer #2 about an hour ago. Almost no symptoms for the first one so I'm hoping for another good dice roll on this one too.

The first year I tried building pedals, I was zero for 12, not a single working build. I was extremely frustrated and very nearly gave up forever.

Coming from a programming background, I figured there had to be a serious bug someplace high up that was flowing downstream into all of my builds. I'm good at following instructions - there's no chance I just independently screwed up each build in a unique and novel way. So I went through every step of my build process.

When I was getting started, an EE friend told me that it's good to use flux when soldering - and so I'd picked up some water-based flux from Home Depot along with my $15 Weller iron. Turns out that the flux was not designed for electronics and was somewhat conductive, so I had random shorts all over the place. That's why I could never get anywhere with troubleshooting.

After I threw out the flux, it was like Karate Kid post-wax-on: nearly all of my builds from that point forward worked the first time, and I quickly regained the confidence that had been sapped by the flux debacle. Fast forward ten years and I've made a full-time job out of it.

During that time, just about everything I learned, I learned by screwing up. So to the degree that I'm any good at what I do today, it's mostly because I've made more mistakes than other people. The important thing is just never make the same mistake twice. Learn everything you can from your failures. Make sure there's no lingering question about why something didn't work, and figure out how you can make sure that specific issue never happens again.

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." - Niels Bohr

Very cool! You going the Wordpress route?

Lol, the Ibanez 7 series have the best circuit protection of all: freely available factory schematics, but drawn so indecipherably that people give up on trying to do anything with them!!

That said, this does look pretty awesome. I added it to the stack.

I got dose #1 today. Strange feeling... and I don't mean the side effects, but that all this might be over in a few months.

They do printings of them occasionally. Small Bear did one a few years ago and had them in stock as recently as last year sometime. You might send Steve an email and see if there are any plans for another run - if not, at least it'll inform him that there is some demand.

Very interesting. Must be leftover stock from when Blackout went under. That's definitely the production PCB and it looks like the production assembly sheet as well.

Aion, I think this is the thread where some of the "speculation" came into play (I see you posted you work near the end of it).
https://www.freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=85&start=20

But... In the "exposed" pics on page 2, aren't those the diodes in question right across the top of the opamp? Plus, there are a couple of other folks (mdd59 & sonicvi on page 8 ) that say they have the diodes as well. There is even a sort of in between 3 diode with trannie "asym" version that JHS (09 Sep 2008, 10:11) posts about on that same page. My theory is that the bluesberry diodes was probably a "fix" that evolved over many years into what your newish version has.

Yep, mine had those same components across the op-amp - the one on the left is the zener (10V) and the one on the right is the 220R power resistor. (It's a red flameproof type, but definitely a resistor.)

But, thanks for pointing out the firsthand accounts from mdd59 and sonicvi, that does sound reliable - so you're right, probably something Paul did for a bit between 2003 and 2007 before settling on the "official" version.

Edit: I originally had a bit of a tangent about how I've found JHS's early posts on FSB/DIYSB (2004-2010) to be unreliable and lacking in details. He'll frequently drop into a thread and make brief yet confident statements of fact without backing it up. Many times it's not confirmed by anyone else, and so I will generally not take anything he says as fact by itself when I'm doing research.

After looking through more of his posts (he's made nearly 1000 across DIYSB and FSB) I have come to the following conclusion:

The user "JHS" from both forums is NOT Josh Scott, but rather someone from Germany or nearby.

Josh was commercially active around the same time, but he's from Mississippi (later relocated to Kansas City where JHS is currently based). The JHS from the forums does not come across as a native English speaker, and occasionally makes mistakes such as omitting spaces between adjectives and nouns, and replacing hard "C"s with "K".

What sealed it for me though was when I saw a post on DIYSB where he wrote "für" instead of "for". I can't picture a world in which a Mississippi boy would make that sort of typo. Add to this that he frequently posted cross-reference links to threads on the Musikding forums and I think that is enough evidence for me.

JHS is also a major musical instrument distributor in the UK (John Hornby Skewes) so it wouldn't be the first time that JHS wasn't JHS.

Anyway - I've now satisfied my own curiosity, hopefully this was interesting to someone else too

My understanding is that the earlier "Bluesberry mod" was just speculation and not based on an actual trace. There are a couple of ways to get a similar effect to the offset null trick without using the actual offset null pin, but the Bluesberry-speculative diodes aren't quite the same. So, my somewhat-but-not-entirely informed opinion would be to avoid the diodes if you want to stay original.

There's a bit more to Bluesberry mode than just the zener and the PNP, the toggle switch also interacts with the bias voltage which is different between the two modes. It may be tricky to retrofit. But, I can also say that I heard very little difference between the two modes. I don't think it's probably enough of a game-changer to warrant all the complexity. Definitely check it out yourself before working too far ahead!

Looks awesome and glad you like it! Scooped octave fuzz is just a magical thing. I go back and forth between this and the Superfuzz, they're so similar yet somehow so different.

Went on a bit of a tear the past few days and came out the other side with this.

I ended up tricking it out pretty thoroughly, which was fun. The rotary switch on the original is nice from an aesthetic perspective, preserving the simple control layout, but it hides some parameters such as jet tone and phaser depth/intensity that are set with fixed resistors and switches instead of knobs.

So we end up with these extra features -

• Jet (the distortion circuit before the phaser) is independently footswitchable
• Full tone control added to Jet mode (the original just has 2 modes, full CW for treble or full CCW for bass on a Big Muff tone stack)
• Distortion can be dialed back (full-up is equivalent to stock) - which should allow for some semi-clean boost to fix volume issues, as well as less fuzzy drive tones
• Depth control added (original rotary control just had two depth presets)
• Fast speed added (on the original, Fast mode is a preset speed and only Slow mode is adjustable)
• Toggle switch for phase stages (4/6/8, with 8 being the stock mode)
• Input buffer added from 1976 revision (most DIY attempts have not included this buffer, which Roland added less than a year after production started in 1975 due to reported volume issues) - the buffer always comes before the effect, but there's an internal slide switch allowing bypass mode to be either true bypass or buffered
• Charge pump inverter for +/-9V (the original required 2 batteries and had no external power jack)

So the end result is that it's still electrically 100% identical to the original Jet Phaser, but a lot more flexible.

I'm only just sending it off to prototyping today, so it'll be several weeks/months before it sees the light of day (and that's assuming it works... lol) - but just to prime any appetites, a significant milestone has been hit

Time to dust off those JFET matching rigs...