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I didn't even know that existed. Very nice.

Unfortunately, the soundclips and a lot of the gut shot pictures were never archived from PedalArea. I remember that was one of the best sites for figuring out if a Flanger had a unique BBD in it, rather than the typical MN3x07. Surprisingly there were quite a few that used oddballs like MN3204's and MN3009's. I still keep on the lookout for some of those, but they seem to have disappeared from any sites like Reverb or Ebay (probably because they actually sound good).

[visitors will opt in to your e-newsletters]

Selling email addresses can be quite profitable. What better way to get people to willingly send a bunch of them to you!
How to Monetize, Rent, or Sell Email Addresses
Just within reading the first few sentences of that site you come across this gem:
"If you have good content, getting email addresses will be relatively easy; visitors will opt in to your e-newsletters, or hand over their contact information in exchange for access to some unique piece of content or tool."
Does it say anywhere on that BYOC placeholder page that they won't sell your email address?
Nope. It's probably not even the same people who own the name anymore.

Sad to go back and see a lot of names that have dropped out of pedal sites.

And sad to see the sites that have also dropped out of existence. Sometimes you can find them on the way back machine, but they're usually just shells of thier former glory. I think around 2010-2016 were the glory years for guitar pedal sites. And Andy Martin was with ProGuitar shop back then too. PedalArea was a good one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150220015131/http://www.pedalarea.com/

Heres mine....
How would you approach that?!

"I would be interested in a pedal featuring:

My first question would be:  what possible situation did this individual find themselves in where this pedal idea was the solution?
"you know it would be great if I could take the sound system of an aircraft carrier and run it through 30 phasers into a vintage Cray 1 computer and then output half of that into an old artari 2600 and the other half into Yankee stadium's P/A, while also having a tuner out for my sitar."

I'd say being a source of "truth" might be a slightly more rational interpretation

Maybe it's just a means for them to flex at dinner parties? "Check out how many websites I've made! Great success!"
I don't know.

Being right about AI doesn't seem like a victory, does it?

I don't know where that quote came from, but it's a good one. It reminds me of that scene in Hunt for Red October where the weapons officer refused to launch a torpedo that didn't have any safeties enabled. Of course, the idiot captain launched the torpedo anyway, and it eventually came back on them and blew them up. The weapons officer was proven correct, but he still died. A victory? Well, for about 1.2 seconds.

Revive the soapbox!
I'm sick and tired of those brainless websites that flood the Internet with ChatGPT-generated content.
"Are you looking for the guitar related tone source? Let's talk about the potentiometer shaft!"
Idiotic phrasing like that gives these sites away, in addition to thier 34 IQ information and stupid web address names. This garbage should be cleaned up / banned / relegated somehow. The real question is:  what possible purpose or advantage does somebody recieve from making these sites? It just clogs up being able to find the 5% of actual relative sites.

I forgot to mention I ended up with a tiny 15pf cap for C23 in the Collosalus, so the value of that cap can be all over the map. Definitely socket it and try many different ones!
I also found a great mod for the manual control:  solder a 10K resistor across the middle lug to the ground lug of the 50K potentiometer. This gives it much more precise control over the sweep, without affecting the behavior at all on the extreme ends of the rotation. I can get usable effect change all the way to about 2:00 on the rotation now, whereas before it would do nothing past around 9:00. I believe this mod simply mimics an audio taper pot, but it's way easier to implement this than take the pedal apart and change out the whole pot.

I've had a couple Madbean boards sitting around for a while, and I've finally had some time to complete them.
First off is a 2022 Collosalus. All I can say is, this was a collosal pain to get dialed in, because of my own choice to go way off the marked trail. I decided to try to follow the original pedal as closely as possible, so I got an old schematic and made the appropriate additions/subtractions. I had some old 1458's and 4558's to spare, so it seemed like a good idea. I also used different transistors just to make it hard on myself. In the end, I had a pedal that "worked", but didn't sound anything like I wanted. Ultimately, I had to make tons of mods to the bias control and the clock circuit. I found that Q5 & Q3 are very critical to the overall sound, and should be closely matched to get it to sound right. I also found a very interesting quirk to the biasing of the MN3007. There seems to be two settings of "correct" operation with the MN3007 in this circuit, and they're basically 90 degrees apart from each other on the bias control. I used the bias circuit on the Wizard schematic from 2009 you can find for the MXR117. At one bias setting, the pedal is very mid-80's rubber band metallic sounding, just like all those flangers people hate. But 90 degrees from that bias setting, suddenly it becomes a liquidy Andy Summers chorus machine, which is very good!
One thing I've noticed is that the Manual control really should be a logarithmic pot. The majority of the control is bunched up in the first 1/4 turn of the pot, and then you get about nothing from noon on. This also happens on my original Ross flanger (which is just an MXR117 with 4558's), so it's a common issue with this circuit.


The next one is the covid-era Rabbit Hole 2020.
My first intention was to build and ELK Sustainer with this, since I was always curious as to how that compared with a regular Big Muff.
I didn't like it. The tone control is just too weird. So I decided to try putting the tone control back to the normal cap value. That was a little better, but it still didn't sound great. So I decided to try swapping out the transistors. I had some random transistors that were in a CD case of all places, and it turns out, they just happened to be old BC239's that had the same markings as ones from mid 70's Rams Head big muffs. I adjusted one resistor in the the tone stack and one capacitor in the clipping stage to match the '75 Rams Head muff and BOOM! A killer-sounding Big Muff was born. This thing rips. Run some mild overdrive into the front end, and it sounds epic. I housed all of it in an old enclosure I had used for a DOD 250 clone, and I used random knobs and slapped a Thomas organ logo on it. All the wear and tear on the enclosure is from real use, so it isn't a relic job. It's now one of my favorite dirt pedals I've ever made. Funny how that happens.

I wasnt planning to do so. Im not sure there would be demand anyway.

I believe you have underestimated the sneakiness...

The microsynth fuzz sound is right up there with the Big Muff and the Fuzztain, because we're all trying to sound like Hummer anyway...

That looks great! Did you use an LM13700 for the OTA? I tried breadboarding this circuit years ago, but never really got a consistent sound out of it. Would love to hear a sound clip.

LOL, there are going to be some weird pieces of pie information on AI-generated DIY surfboards. Political activist Tubescreamer relay bypass, inserted Klon hair piece at the key buffer input. White house rally trumps the audio taper output pot while connecting pin 3 to active shooter tone controls.
Remove resistors R3, R24, and R31 and replace them with jumpers to activate the Ukraine edition transparent overdrive CE-1 mod.
Taylor Swift.

Mayonnaise.

Ah, one of the Smashing Pumpkins best songs.
Remember to bevel the stater to reduce hypersonic vibration, otherwise your germanium transistors will suffer harmonic saturation. The first greeting is for academic purpose only. Insert diode up there.
Closed captioning provided by Toyota™

One of my things has a big muff front end but where the tone control is there is a set of state variable filters and a resonant frequency control to dial in a stupidly broad array of sounds, many of them borderline unusable (according to your taste of course).

This sounds amazing.

Nothing wild just a style I like, clean, not gimmicky, colourful. Inspired by 90s boutique (think Lovetone, way huge etc)

Perfect. There's a reason 90's boutique pedals are now some of the most valuable ever made:  Klon, Flange with No Name...good grief, those are 2 to 3 grand now.

This sounds like a awesome endeavor, and I look forward to seeing what your design aesthetic is. It's tough to stand out in the pedal business, and sometimes I think companies try to get too gimmicky. Ultimately, tried and true, functional pedals that feel like a nice piece of gear always stand out.
I would recommend that if you make a Phase 90-style clone, add the Wampler "tremolo" mod on a footswitch. It's a really unique-sounding mod that I've never seen MXR make available, and it would really help your pedal to stand out in the sea of phasers. In fact, always put mods on a footswitch. No companies seem to do that. They always either have a ton of options on toggles, or nothing. And how many times do we play these pedals and think, "that would be a great feature on a footswitch"? How many overdrives could basically be two drives in one, but they give you only one footswitch? Just about all of them.
Players want footswitches, not knobs and toggles. We set tone controls and leave them (maybe switchable tone modules would be better than a tone knob?). Drives and fuzz pedals rarely have bias controls. Personally, I would rather have a bias knob than a tone control, because the tone control is probably just a Big Muff tone circuit slapped in there, or a simple treble cut.
Boring.

I like that the "What's been good" post has had over 23,000 views since June of this year, yet of that only .002 percent have made a reply. So what have the 99.008 percent of the 23,000 views been for?
Maybe we should start a "Putin Trump" thread, and watch the views soar to 23,000,000 in just a week! There has to be a way to monetize that! Let's figure it out and we'll all have free pedal parts for life.
A.I., bots, and general data mining is idiotic.