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My 6 year old laptop has started to have issues, so I'm going to replace it.  

The old laptop had an audio line-in socket.  Worked great for occasional recording of the guitar. 

New laptops all seem to be USB-C.  It's the way of the future apparently. 

I'm looking for recommendations for a USB-C to line-in or guitar in converter thing.  Doesn't have to be super high professional quality.  Something that works with Garage Band on the Mac if possible (but I imagine pretty much anything that presents an audio source via USB will work?)

This is two more boards from Nucleon FX, combined into the one enclosure. First up, a Saturn V distortion, then second, a Redstone boost and equaliser. The distortion is really good, it makes you feel like a rock god, even if you can only strum a few chords like me.   

These boards were from Rockhorst as part of last years BOTY prize.  Thanks Rockhorst!   They work well together.  It also works well with the bass guitar.



Given that both boards had rockety type names, I went with a rocket type theme for some of the text.

This is my first attempt at stamping the letters into the metal. It turned out OK!

For the letter stamping, I used my sledge hammer as an anvil, and then stuck some angle metal on the top of the enclosure using masking tape, to act as a guide. Then used a normal hammer to belt the letters in. The anvil idea worked OK, but wasn't as effective on the lettering closest to the edge, where it wasn't quite supporting the top of the enclosure. 

I've used some model paints to colour the lettering, and sanded it off to 240 grit.



I think I may have hit 'peak silver knob' on this one.  Not sure that I like that much aluminium, so I might swap to black metal knobs later if I don't get used to it. 





Did I realise after stamping all the letters and doing all the drilling, that I'd put the wording for 'In' and 'Out' on the wrong sides? You betcha. I had to cut the lettering away with the rotary tool, then redo it on opposite sides. *sigh*  No one will ever notice I'm sure...

Two builds that I've finished up - both boards from Nucleon FX. 

First one is the Celeritas compressor, based on the Diamond compressor.  I've used the CoolAudio VTL5C3 vactrol in this build, and it seems to work fine with this circuit.  I also ended up putting in a small board with a voltage doubler, to make the effect run at 18 volts, to remove a bit of the distortion when the compression first kicks in.

Drilling the enclosure on this one turned into an exercise in stupidity. I wasn't wearing gloves, and was holding the enclosure while drilling. The drill bit stuck, which turned the enclosure into a spinning blade of death... and took a chunk out of my finger. It also ripped a bit out of the hole it was drilling, so one of the side jacks is on an angle.





Next one is the Solstice drive.  I like the sound from this one.  Lots of options to sculpt the tone. 

I couldn't decide whether to bias the input stage as a buffer, or to give a bit more of a boost, so I ended up putting in an extra switch to change the bias on the fly. Probably didn't need it in the end, but I do like options.

I was happy with the waterslide decal on this one - I got the graphics to line up pretty well with the knobs and switches.  I drilled the holes first, then stuck the enclosure on the scanner, which gave me a template for doing the graphics. 

I then managed to drop a sharp knife on it when cutting out the holes after applying the decal.  It left a bit of a mark near the In jack. 

Covered the decal with some yellow acrylic, which looks really odd in the photos but much better IRL. 

Just trying to buy all the 9mm pots I need on Tayda... and they are out of the sizes I need.  Restock is listed as end of November.  Two and a half months???  Outrageous. 

Of course, they have hundreds of thousands in stock of the values I don't want. 

Gah, first world problems!   

This is a wah pedal that I've been procrastinating on for at least six months now.  I started by reading the RG Keen article, and played around with all the components until I settle on a 4 way switch for the centre frequency, and I've added a pot to control the gain/distortion of Q1.  Used a yellow Fasel inductor. 

Board by Elecrow, and I added a 3PDT and rotary mini board as well, to make the build easier.  I named the PCB 'Yowie' as that seems to be the equivalent of 'Bigfoot' in this part of the world. 





Inside wiring is pretty minimal, but I did need to run ground wires to the backs of the pots and to the enclosure itself.  Apparently the paint that I used was too good an insulator.



For the finish, I have matched it to the guitar that I built last year. I'm using car spray paint (rattle cans), in a red and black, with clear coat over the top.





Then sanding the clear coat down with 600, 800, 1200, 1500, 2000, 4000, 6000, 8000 and 12000 grit paper and pads. After that, a rub with some car scratch remover.  I didn't spend as much time sanding as I did with the guitar, so the finish isn't completely scratch free.  But it does the job. 

This is a Liquid Eternity chorus from https://www.nucleonfx.com/, based on the Arion SCH-1 from the 80s. It's a nice sounding chorus, and works well with guitar and bass from my testing.

This PCB came as a prize from the Build of the Year competition in 2017, so thanks go to Rutger at Nucleon from providing the prize (along with a few more PCBs I'm still working on!)

There are a lot of components on this board, and it was very tightly packed. Good soldering practice.  I added a momentary switch in place of R13, to allow for a momentary removal of the dry signal - it gives a really swirly vibe type sound when pressed.

Only 'issue' I had with the build was that I wanted to use a clear blue LED, but it didn't seem to play nicely with the optical bypass system on the board. I'll revisit that at a later date (or, most likely, just put up with the red defuse LED).

I also need to get a source of metal washers. The white plastic ones don't look fantastic with the rest of this build.  (Anyone know where to buy the right size metal washers, in Australia, let me know.  I've tried the hardware store but the M12 washers seem slightly too small.)

The guts:



For the enclosure, something new for me.  My partner got bought me a voucher for a metal engraving course for my recent birthday (where she finds these ideas I don't know), so I took this enclosure along to the 2nd day of the course.  Turns out I was the only person at the course, so I had two days of one on one instruction, and we got to work on whatever I wanted.  My efforts are pretty amateur, the stuff that the instructor does is amazing. 

A few photos from the engraving course:





The text is done with a tiny chisel by hand, rocking the chisel side to side as I wrote the letters. The other cuts have been done by a hand held, air powered chisel, to cut the pattern into the aluminium. Then used an air powered stipple thing to put tiny little dots into the pattern.

I finished it off with 400 grit sand paper.  That's taken off some of the pattern, so I needed to carve deeper in some spots obviously.  I'll be looking into getting some of the chisels to use on future builds.  The whole air powered setup costs thousands apparently, so won't be getting that any time soon.   

I'm building my first wah pedal.  I've got a yellow Fasel inductor to stick in, but I've now realised that it is too tall to fit in the enclosure space.

So far my thinking is: 

- I could rotate my PCB 180 degrees, as there is a bit more vertical space if I have the inductor at the top end of the board.  But then I'd have all the connections for the jacks etc at the wrong end.

- I could try to bend the pins on the inductor by 90 degrees so I could lie it down... I'm a bit worried that I'll damage the inductor doing that though.

- I could just lie it down and solder on some extra leads coming up from the PCB to join it all up. 

So, how do these things normally get installed? 

I've been looking at pictures on the internets and there are a few where people have just bent the inductor pins... so maybe I just need to man up and give that a try. 

This one is a chopped OC-2 clone - on Diablochris's PCB "The Low Down".   It does octave down. 

I wasn't really happy with the 'clean' signal path in this schematic, as it ended up clipping quite badly at the first op-amp. So I ended up removing the volume pots, hard wired it to have no clean signal, and then made a small blend circuit to mix between a proper clean and the octave effect.  Also added optical bypass on the vero board. 

The octave down works pretty well, on guitar and bass.  It tends to crap out on the lowest string of the bass.  But that's OK. 

I thought I'd measured everything three times, but when I put the switching and blend circuit into the box, it was about 2mm too high, and the lid didn't close.  Dammit. So I pulled that apart, reversed the switch and a few components, and got it to fit.

Graphics are a blended octopus with cat. I dunno, seemed appropriate. And I think this is the most expensive knob I've put on a pedal - it was about $7. Given that there was only one knob, I figured I could splurge on it, while still maintaining the pedal to knob cost ratio. :-)

I sat down tonight to write up a few build reports, and found that my pedal blog had been hacked. 

It's some stupid javascript that has replaced all of the WordPress default javascript with nasties, and it's also gone through all of the other Wordpress sites that I have on the same domain and infected them too. 

So.  No build reports tonight.   

I've deleted all my sites so that they can't infect anyone else.  I left the images so hopefully my old build reports still show up with images in their threads. 

I've managed to save the text of all my blog posts, when I'm feeling up to it I'll try create a clean install and import what I can.  Not really feeling motivated to do that right now. 

And I was having such a good weekend - building a new desk for pedal building, and some shelves to house all the pedals. 

Stupid internet.

I'm looking at building a Wah pedal some time soon, and I'm interested in opinions about the pot to use.

Is it worth getting the Dunlop Hot Potz II, or will I not really notice a difference between that and something cheaper? 

There are cheaper 'generic' ones, but I'm not sure if they are just a normal linear pot with a gear stuck on, it is hard to tell. 

I've finished off the DS-1 clone that I did a PCB for recently.  The PCB worked, so I'm happy with that.

The 9 clipping options include a mix of 914 and Bat41 diodes, as well as some power mosfets, LEDs, 4001 diodes and some 1n270s, which make the whole thing very fuzzy.  Most of the options have different sounds, but I can't hear any difference between the few 4001 combinations that I put in. 

The only major issue with this build was my ancient 15 watt soldering iron died part way through.  I ended up ordering a Hakko FX888D station as a replacement and xmas gift to myself.   It was meant to ship overnight... but three days later hadn't left the warehouse.  Turned out that they were waiting on a free gift to include with the order, which was on back order.  Argh.  First world problems.

I wasn't feeling particularly creative when doing the artwork, so it got a generic bad 80s makeover, with tiger print and stencil font decal.

I'm really enjoying the soft touch relay bypass.  There's a little bit of a click sometimes, but overall so much nicer than the 3PDT clunk. 

I've still got a few of these PCBs available for free in the PIF thread: http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=27044.0

Anyone know what sort of pedal has been used for the bass guitar on this song by Forq?

Almost sounds like a clarinet, it's pretty cool.   (My partner is learning the song, and now she wants the pedal to go with it...)

This is a Sonic Reducer (version 1.0) from Parasit Studio on perfboard.  I didn't plan it as much as I could have, so ended up with a few jumpers here and there.

It's a fun sounding circuit.  Really gets that 8 bit computer game sound if you dial it in right. 

Graphics done by my kid.  He thought that it sounded like Mario jumping, so hence the theme. 

I've done the top with some laser etched perspex over the decal.  Last build I did with this stuff, it was OK, but that was a cheap enclosure.  This time, the enclosure wasn't so cheap, and the metal was thicker, so the pots didn't have enough thread to tighten the nuts.  I started by counter-sinking the back of the enclosure, then also had to cut away some of the front of the perspex, and also trim the bottom off the knobs.  What a nightmare.  I think I'll have to find some thinner perspex if I do this again, or use longer threaded pots.  3mm perspex is too thick. 

I wanted an arcade style momentary button to go with the theme, so I've put a relay bypass on board as well.  As I've done a lot of Arduino in the past, I went with a ATTiny85 for the controller and programmed the switching in Arduino IDE.  I didn't worry about muting the volume as the relay switches, it seems to be really quiet already.  But I do have 1 extra IO pin on the ATTiny if I want to do the muting code later. 





And totally unplanned - the etched writing on the perspex glows in the dark when the button is lit. 



Guts shots:





And the inside of the enclosure, to try to get a bit more depth for the pot threads   

This one is a 1776 Effects 'Buzz Saw'.  The "Baa" mode made me think of sheep, and it was a slippery slope into alpacas after that.  Photo is one of my mum's alpacas.

I've done an optical switching mechanism on vero for this one, and glowing red eyes for the alpaca - super glued the LEDs on the inside of the enclosure, and did 1mm holes underneath the eyes.   

The top is waterslide decal for the photo and black text, and then a laser engraved perspex over the top.  I got that done at ponoko.com, they give you a $20 discount on your first order, which was more than enough to do 2 x 1590B and 1 x 1590BB plates, and an assortment of washers and things.  The shipping cost to Australia was enough to make it not worth doing very often though.  It's 3mm thick perspex, which made fitting the pots pretty hard.  I had to countersink the inside of the enclosure so there was enough thread poking through to put a nut on. 

Cool sounding fuzz... the two modes give it a nice range of sounds. 

This one is a Theremin Fuzz from Parasit Studio (thanks Freppo!), with a custom PT2399 echo circuit that I put together (achievement unlocked?)

I found this old Apple Airport base station behind my parents' filing cabinet a while ago.  It had been faithfully serving up a defunct wifi network for about 5 years since the telephone company technician installed a new wifi router for my parents, and didn't bother turning off the old one.  I decided to give it a better life. 

Rotary switches for the octave selector on the theremin, and another rotary for selecting the theremin, echo, or both chained.  I've put in a small circuit with a few transistors so I can switch both the LEDs on when both effects are running. 

The echo has speed warping and max feedback momentary switches.

The drilling was a bit of a hassle – there are no straight surfaces on this thing, so lining up holes was a challenge.  The boards sit off the knobs and switches with some orange juice container plastic that I cut up for the purpose.  And of course after I got everything together, I found that the very middle lug on the stomp switch wasn't quite soldered properly, so had to pull everything out again.

This one took quite a while to get finished – it's probably been sitting on the shelf in various states of undress for a few months.  But it's finally finished, and working.  I had to go with shielded wires leading into the Theremin Fuzz, as it really misbehaved if it didn't get a nice clean signal.  The shielded wires seemed to help the tracking. 

Originally I had an optical bypass in there as well, but that seemed to be screwing with the theremin as well, so I pulled it out and went with a plain 3PDT.  I'd probably just wired something wrong. 





Gut shot:



Night shot:



Video demo (about 2 minutes long):

http://graybloomfield.com/guitar/2017/07/31/the-mothership/mothership-480/

I posted a build report the other week about part of my kid's school science project - a tremolo build.  (http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=25928.0)

Here's the rest of the project - he has built a tremolo using a motor, spring, container, and liquid sloshing around.  There was much science done testing different liquids, and in the end 'Pine-o-clean' was chosen as the tremolo liquid of choice. 

It has two configurations with the container upright wobbling, or horizontal being bounced back and forwards in a pipe.  Amazingly (well, to me anyway) this works out as an almost sine wave tremolo and a square wave, respectively. 

The tremolo has a bit of randomness to it... sometimes the waves come in groups of two or three close together, then with a bit of a gap.  It's a pretty cool sound. 

Example of the waveform coming out of this thing:



He also played around with a solenoid instead of the motor, but that bit isn't finished yet. 

The 'guts':



A 30 second video of it working:

http://graybloomfield.com/guitar/2017/07/30/liquid-tremolo/img_1758/

And a 5 minute video if you want more 'science':

http://graybloomfield.com/guitar/2017/07/30/liquid-tremolo/science2017-480/

A Shoot the Moon tremolo build - this one was done by my kid.  This is part of his school science project this year, so he's doing all the work on this one. 

Normally when he helps out with the soldering, I'll select the parts and hand them to him, letting him know "This is R7", etc. 

For this build I left him to it with the board, soldering iron, component list and box of many parts.  He managed pretty well - only one mistake on the build.  He put a 100k resistor in place of a 100R... which took me about half an hour to track down.  Then another half an hour to realise that desoldering the resistor had broken the trace between the top and bottom of the board.   

I also made him do all of the off board wiring (including off board pots) on this build.  Because I'm evil. 

Graphics were also his design.  I had a nice artistic photo of the moon, but once he heard the name of the pedal he went with a Death Star theme.  Waterslide inkjet decal, with some clear spray over. 

Cheap eBay enclosure, which was pretty crap quality (the aluminium had cracks in it!), and finally found a use for some of the giant knobs I accidentally ordered months ago. 

The sound is pretty cool.  The square wave / sine wave setting is especially interesting for his science project, so that's a bonus!

The gut shot shows that the board has had the name scratched off.  It was like that when I bought it, not sure what the story is with that!

This is a Fuzz face variant with a MOSFET in the 2nd transistor spot.  It's a bit insane when you turn the fuzz pot all the way up.  I originally got the schematic for this on muzique.com 

This is the first pedal that I've built for someone other than a family member.  Achievement unlocked!

My wife's boss wanted a pedal, so he borrowed all of my fuzz pedals, and picked out this one as his favourite, and commissioned me to build one.  I charged for parts plus added a small fee that didn't really cover my time at all.

He also wanted an internal battery - I've not done that for a while, I'd forgotten how much extra wiring is needed to add all the battery switching.   

Nothing fancy with the graphics, he wanted it plain. 





And a photo of my soldering 'helper'

Can anyone point me in the direction of a website that has info about typical LFO speed ranges for tremolo pedals?  I could have a guess, but something written down would be good, as this is for a school science project my kid is doing.

Failing that, I'll welcome expert opinions of forum members. 

(I'm trying very hard to not take over the project, it's meant to be his work  )

Someone gave me some vanilla fudge in a tin a while back.  My first thought was "Ooh, fudge!" but my second thought was "Ooh, pedal enclosure!".   

Figured that the flowery finish would be appreciated by my partner, and she plays bass.  So I've turned it into a 'Bazz Fuss' variant from Runofgroove/Home Wrecker. 

Switchable diodes - a 914 for insane gain and fuzz levels, and a 270 for a more refined sound. 

Drilling the thin metal was exciting as always, and had a few tears that I've managed to cover up with the washers.  The metal is curved, thin, bendy and has embossed flowers.  Not great for drilling precision holes!

Customised the text on the bottom for some fun (and then spent about half an hour trying to convince the printer to print landscape onto small photo paper - argh!)

Not convinced on the knob style at the moment, I might swap it out later.  Maybe white would look better?