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Handed in my resignation yesterday.

It had essentially become intolerable at work (been there 16 years). My last chance was a request for a sabbatical which was denied, so my resignation went in. People who work there understand it. People who see it as me giving up a secure and well paid job in this day an age think I'm insane. But in all honesty there's more to life than money and sometimes when you're just not happy, you gotta take a leap.

I have some savings put aside, so for 6-12 months I'm going to take a break and mess with pedals and generally do creative stuff. Then, who knows! I'll be back looking for work, but not in IT, that's done. Might end up driving a van. If so, c'est la vie.

I'm making a kit amp and the only bit I can't do, mainly as I lack any sort of workshop/tools rather than the inclination, is the cab. Now I know the cab I'm going for, indeed the first two pictures are of the actual cabs that the bloke who'll be making it has done for others, but I cannot decide on the finish:

I'll be fitting vintage fender white knobs so it'll be the full blonde look if I go that way. Making option 1 the traditional choice.

Option 2 is simply to match my other kit, which is black.

Finally I just really like the burgundy and black (you'll have to imagine the grille cloth is black) cabs I've seen.

Throw a vote in, help me decide.

   Another legend passes   

Yep, there are some very expensive effects that incorporate this. Dano used to make a cheap as chips one also. If they still did, I'd have bought one to be fair as it's exactly what I want. 2nd hand prices are a bit silly though.

I also expect that this might be impossible to do DIY as I expect digital trickery may be required:

This is something I've been after for a while now as a DIY project and no one has done it. Where I think half of what it does would be relatively easy... There are bits that I suspect might be more than a little challenging.

The easy bit I suspect could be achieved by two vibratos. The ROG Tri-Vibe for example can get a sufficiently rotary sounding effect on one of it's settings. One would be needed to cover the high frequencies and the other the low (as they need to be able to run out of sync and at different speeds). To be like a leslie, you need to be able to stomp between a fast setting and a slow. Again not to much of a problem... I would have thought were it not for the need for the speeds to ramp up and ramp down, and for them to do it at different rates (as the low frequency rotary speaker spins up and down slower than the high frequency horns do).

Things you could drop are stereo and the overdrive that a lot of these pedals have. In an attempt to simplify and keep the parts down.

This is a good demo of the DLS RotoSim that does pretty much everything and is less complicated than the likes of the Ventilator or Lex:

This is a real Leslie so you can see what it's emulating (ignoring the sales blurb):

I don't normally post non-MB builds here, but this was fabbed by Haberdasher so I thought I would. That and I think it looks cool.

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Reverse engineered by Galego on DIYSB , this is Slade's true-bypass and seriously shrunk down version of a Decimator.

We were originally wanting something along the original Alien poster with "in space no one can hear you scream" or with the Nostromo on it. Both would have been really dark which causes us all sorts of problems, so we try and avoid that. Instead Geiger's Alien Lifecycle 'doodle' really fit well and I knew would work nicely. Yep, it's intentional that the stomp is the chest burster

I wondered what taking a short brick and shoving it into a long would be like. We'll it's kinda cool, it gains a shimmery modulation and sounds like a hooooge room. As you can stomp either, or, or both on this box. I thought I'd label them room for the short, hall for the long and it has a nice picture of a section of York Minster covering both.





This one is supposed to mimic David Gilmour's lead tone on The Wall.

A Skreddy P19 on a Mudbunny board. As usual for Skreddy stuff, it's rather excellent. The switch gives it a mild mid hump (rather than the standard mild scoop), to allow you to cut through in a live situation. It's quite subtle, but it's there.

Why Betty Paige in a nurses outfit? Why not ;-)

Built for a friend who wanted it to look similar to the original pedal. He used to have one and had in his head was yellow, turns out that was the The Power Boost which was orangy/yellow. The overdriver was actually black. Anyhow, I still think it looks pretty cool.





An original looks like this:



The Marshall knobs were sadly fractionally too big and didn't look right with the yellow

It started out as an idea which I ended up chatting to Wez Venables about. Then he showed me his mystic woods and, well, one thing led to another and this little beauty was born. May I present to you the WezV English Walnut Stratele (Pictures are all clickable for much enlargement):







Specs:

Alder body with an English walnut top.
Maple neck with a rosewood board and walnut veneer on the headstock.
Neck has been carved to be a C to a mild V as you get towards the headstock (to ape the Baja neck that I like).
Bridge is a sawed off Fender ashtray.
Pups are an old BKP Flat 50 (now a Flat 52) in the bridge, neck and middle are Irish Tours. Standard strat wiring on a 5 way CRL switch with CTS pots.

It's more of a single cut strat than a tele. But it does the tele thing when switched to the bridge really nicely. Which is exactly what we were aiming for.

The single only thing I can level against it was entirely down to my own pikeyness. The pups I scrounged from the internet. The bridge and neck were ebay specials. The middle I got from Ben at BKP (getting a middle on the net was proving difficult). But because of the way Tele and strat pups are wound, I could only have it hum cancelling with one or the other. So I kept the strat section stratty by having it cancel with the neck. Leaving the B+M pos sounding quite nasal. Every other pos is how you'd expect it. But I might have to stick a super switch in there so I can do something else with pos 4. Maybe B+N or I might stick the Esquire caps on it for something else in that pos. Something for me to tinker with later anyhow.

A LaVache and Fat Pants in the same enclosure to save on parts. But I also had a sneaking suspicion they might work well together, and indeed they do.





A Boneyard built using the suggested part substitutions from the original single sided project. Then further simplified by the fitting of just the hi-gain pot and no boost. I just liked it better this way. However it seems to be prone to squealing when all three knobs are cranked which the original didn't do. Not sure why, but they sound the same back-to-back and I never crank everything anyhow.





Madbean Collosalus. Flange-tastic

Well it's together and as far as kicking ass goes, it's mighty. This is the baby boobtube with Renegadrian's 6.66x supply and Klon buffer on a single piece of vero with a submini tube. Logic dictates that this little creation be named Damien. Sonically it's nigh on identical to it's bigger brother. Just in a wee box.





For those that want a crack at it:

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2012/05/20/jeri-ellsworth-her-commodore-64-bass-guitar-thing/

I really quite like this. Crank the bass & gain, pull the treble back and it's a thick fuzz. Everything in the centre and it's a nice over drive. That and a distortion inbetween.

Though it has been a good lesson in not being a pikey. This is a recycled enclosure and for the sake of saving a few quid and buying a new one, I just made my life difficult. As the PCB has board mounted pots and both the LED and power socket got in the way (you'll note that the decal has the power where I'd expect it to be had it been a recent build).

That made it awkward, the crushed and therefore shorting power line from said socket took some finding because of this. Then I've managed to grind the head off one of the old screws. As such, a simple build like this ended up taking several hours more than it normally should. I need to be less of a tight arse!





Jaymz3: The final evolution! This was made purely to try out some tweaking of the build. I can no happily say that we've nailed how to do this one in terms of wiring, component choice and biasing. It's as quiet as the 2nd we did but way more useable. Unfortunately this means that mine (number 1) needs completely rebuilding and the 2nd needs some components swapping out...

This is, to all intents and purposes, a Marshall in a box. Quite literally. It's the front end of a JCM800 amp scaled down and stuck in a stomp with the valves running starved plate. Power is from a Schmitt trigger based charge pump getting us up to 60v on the plates for this one.

Works well as a stomp, works incredibly well as a pre-amp plugged straight into the return of effects loops. Which I suppose is exactly what it is.

The Baby Boob Tube (coming soon) works better as a stomp box to be fair. We just wanted to see if we could make a dual tube pedal work right

Well it has a bit of Madbean content. This is my old Elunium PU36 Explosive Space Modulator (Ugly Face + LFO) combined with my old Tremble Oh! (MB Double Flush) and a Rebote.

This is also the last one of these I'm making as they're a royal PITA to build. Had to have one for me though (other two were for other peeps).

I thought I'd post the results of the poll. The compromise decal was selected. Essentially it's in the style of a DAM knockoff, but with a watermarked Bender shaking his fist at the pointless mojoness of it all.



Many thanks to Badgerific for the trannies. There's a polarity flipping board hidden under the main board so I can run it on the same PSU as other effects (I didn't want to spoil the look)



This is a DMM, using the same decal we used for Marauder's. As it was the second it's a little neater than the first.

After grabbing a set of nigh on perfect gain germ trannies from badgerific on this board, I've built myself a tonebender Pro MkII clone. Though it's completely against my beliefs, I went and bought a load of mojo parts and have pretty much knocked together a mojo-tastic board (it's over at Marauder's at the moment if he fancies taking a camera to it).

It's bloody good, but leaves me with a dilemma. DIY tradition would have me now box it up to look like a D*A*M knockoff... Which I can certainly do (the boxes he used to use I can get from maplins, a bit of water slidage, etc), but that really isn't my style. Though I can see Marauder's point on this, in that if I'm going to go to the trouble of mojo-ing it up, to stick a cartoon of bender on the front of it kinda misses the point.

As I simply can't make my mind up, I'm gonna throw this out to the MBP to decide.

D*A*M Style



or Juan Style

Finally got around to boxing this one up (still catching up with some things I had built before xmas!).

Love it:

This is a Questionable Lady (our attempt at an approximation of Skreddy ? Lady), but with a modded tone stack (all hail Duncan's Tone Stack Calculator!) to incorporate a massive mid scoop. Stoner-tastic. Done on a Madbean Mudbunny board.