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Thanks! Yeah the looper is a good idea. The signal generator is putting out a signal louder than a guitar, so it was hard to gauge where the sound was dropping out once I got a guitar plugged in.

Hey folks, I took a bit of time off from builds and have started up again. One of my first new projects was building a God City Instruments Brutalist, Jr, but I am about to toss it into the fail bin. Basically, signal passes fine when it's bypassed. When not by passed, all I get is white noise. If I run a signal generator out of my phone and into it, I hear the signal within the white noise. If I run a guitar, I don't get any guitar signal passing through. Running a probe through the circuit, I hear the same results. The voltages on the TL072s looks correct to me (~4.5v), but the signal generator tone going through the circuit seems weak.

I've replaced the switch, the TL072s, what I thought was a bad cap and a bad wire, but to no avail. Looking for any last-ditch hail mary ideas before I relegate this to kaput. Build guide is here:

http://www.kurtballou.com/brutalistjr/GCI_BrutalistJR_Instructions.pdf

Thanks in advance.

-Bret

Thanks everyone! I appreciate the kind words. I will definitely check out the doombutter.

Had fun building this one, and even more fun playing with the multitude of insane sounds it can produce. The acutal build was super easy, while the boxing part took a bit of finessing. Even then, I'm disappointed with how the wiring turned out (I'd envisioned something much more elegant and sparse...HAH!) and the graphics were a semi-fail, but it works and I dig the general idea. I definitely want to find more weird/warped circuits to build out.

Very clean and beautiful builds!

Thanks for the kind words, everyone.

The graphics I did using Papillo flat vinyl sticker paper run through my inkjet, then I put a layer of Papillo waterproof overlay UV laminate on top. I then cut the shapes out using a scalpel and the magnifier on my desk lamp, which as you can see, was met with various degrees of success and/or failure. I really wanted the sparkle to show through like a night sky, and without silk screening skills, this seemed like the best option. I was concerned that white waterslide paper would be even harder to cut the forms out without messing it all up. I actually liked working with the vinyl decal paper and laminate, but I could see it working much better if it was done as a full-face decal without any complicated cuts.

As for jumpers, the wiring diagram that came with the build docs didn't have that, but this is also the buffered setup, so perhaps that is why?

Nice! This is actually going to be my next build. Nice to see another one working and looking great!

Very cool look to this build. That bezel is rad. Great job! Is that a huge capacitor or a Vienna sausage?

Thanks! And I know, right? I ordered those because they were on Amazon Prime and they looked *much* smaller on the screen. Oh well, it works and fits, right?

Ok, this one was by far the most challenging build I've done yet. While the graphics turned out a little rough around the edges (I tried something new for me and it was semi-successful), I learned so much with this build. Ended up having to do a lot of troubleshooting due to some sloppy soldering and some broken pins on the Belton Brick. The positive is that I really feel much more comfortable making sense of a schematic, translating IC pinouts and voltages, using the audio probe Leevibe gave me a long time ago that I had yet to use, and basically figuring stuff out without asking for help. Mostly though, I just love how this thing sounds.

Thanks for all the kind words and encouragement, everyone. Midwayfair, I will definitely add those resistors in when I get a free moment or two this week. Thanks again for the guidance!

What's the second footswitch?

Do you want some advice with the vu meter in case you decide to go back in? You just need a couple resistors to add some gain to it. I'm not sure how you have it hooked up, but the perc will spit out more than 1V without breaking a sweat, which ought to be enough make the meter jump to -3 at least. I'm squinting at your buffer layout and I don't see any resistors to create a bias voltage, so it's possible the op amp isn't actually working.

The second footswitch is there to flip between the two different gain methods. It's a minor difference, but the "stun" setting is less overdriven and muddier than the "kill" setting.

Absolutely, I totally appreciate the advice! So in the previous board I'd wired up for the buffer, I had those resistors, but that board tanked between the breadboard and the perfboard. In hindsight, I think I fried the opamp at some point. So I saw a more simplified circuit without the resistors and that is basically what this is, with the exception of a 47uf output cap instead of 10uf (I was getting bigger needle spikes with the 47uf when running a sweep tone through it). As for output values, I believe it's currently outputting around 1.4v after the cap. The needle seems to hang between the -10 and -7 marks when I'm playing, with the occasional spike above that. So much of this stuff is still pretty abstract to me, so any guidance is much appreciated. Thanks!

A year in the making. This project somehow survived two moves, three trips to Colorado, a breakup, a reconciliation, seasonal affective disorder, closing a business, three different VU buffer circuits, a bad transistor, and various other obstacles that had to be overcome to finally wrap it up. The worst of those obstacles had to do with the finish, which turned out to be a nightmare, and then there was that one time nothing on it was working. Luckily, Leevibe swooped in like the hero he is and fixed a bunch of my rookie mistakes. You see, this was to be my first real build, but it seems I bit off a bit more than I could solder, so to speak. And so it sat on my bench for months at a time, mocking me every time I walked past it, guts all exposed and strewn about; lacquer fumes invading my sinuses like an unwelcome house guest.

So yeah, this is a clone of the Interfax Harmonic Percolator, using a Stomptown PCB. Since this pedal is Steve Albini's go-to distortion mayhem device, I decided to name it after a Shellac album, and to give it a design treatment that brings to mind an obscure military weapon of torture that was recently unearthed. Honestly, much of what looks like "relicing" is actually a crappy finish that dents, cracks, and clouds up when a mere mosquito flies by it. So I'm going to run with it and probably make the distressed effect look more intentional and natural. And then there was the VU meter. Something that seemed like it would be such an easy little fun visual gimmick turned out the be a complete pain in my ass. After trying a VU meter buffer kit from DIY Tubes that stopped working at some point (that I probably fried in one of my failed tests), I finally slapped on some pants and read up on opamp buffer circuits and rolled my own very simple circuit. Does it work? Yeah, it moves the needle when the pedal is engaged and played through, but not a ton. Close enough for government work, says I, and fitting of the theme. So, for now, I'm calling this bastard done. It's going on my pedalboard. Today.

Thanks, all!

Raw Fuzz (Fuzz Dog build):















Stella Drive (boost/overdrive pedal I built and my daughter decorated):









Grind Customs Chimaera BFD:

One thought: do you have the corrupt backup that overwrote the non-corrupt one? We might be able to pull that data into MySQL and do some repairs on it and re-import it.

No, i could never access it. From what I gathered, it was some kind of disk read error on the server or something. The table kept showing up as "in use" and I could not export it or anything. Thanks for the offer, though.

Is there a current automated backup that you can access now that took place before they did this restore? Even if it's the corrupt data, it might be fixable. I don't mean to question your skills or abilities or insinuate that you haven't tried everything, just want to be able to help if at all possible.