Messages

Anyone know of any mods for the Rothwell Love Squeeze? 

Thanks in advance!

Vary the resistor to ground in the second half of the op amp -- now it's a threshold control. (This is essentially what the Bearhug's compression control is.) You can vary the threshold to get more compression without cranking the ratio pot, so you don't have to overdrive the LED limiter at the higher compression settings.

Vary the 220 nF to ground -- now it's a frequency-specific threshold.

Vary the 22R in the second op amp - attack control. Time is that resistor in parallel with the decay resistor. 10K would be 100mS. The attack is almost immediate right now, even more so because of the LED limiter in the feedback loop of the first op amp.

Vary the 10K in parallel with the hold cap in the envelope section -- decay control. (This is the what the switch in the bearhug does.) It's set at 100mS stock. If you go up to 100K, you will get a full second of decay.

Oh, the humanity.  This goes against all that is sane and natural.

I'm guessing it is more difficult to place these parts then the SMD parts, yes?

It gets hard to reach after a bit. The real challenge was the transistors. The SMD parts have the pins in a completely inside out place. I had to do Q1 point to point because I couldn't manipulate the pins enough to get them to the right pads.

That pulled it from beans darkside

Seriously, a dream of mine is to make a pedal with glass resistors, but I can't seem to convince the one guy I know who has some to sell me even a set for a rangemaster at any price.

I still don't know why you never ask me for parts Jon when I am right down the road!!!!

I can get my hands on a bunch of NOS glass resistors! NOW... I don't know what values or how many as I do not have an inventory but... I might be able to get something together for you 

Just let me know.... 

PMed like gangbusters.

As previously suggested, it would be far easier and quicker to scan the bottom of the board and make a layout for etching.  It looks to be a single sided board.

I wouldn't mind trying this however... could you link me to the tutorial about it. I looked but I could not find it.

As for the complexity.... I have done FAR... FAR more complex builds than this. Also, I do not plan on "transplanting" all of the components. Probably just the transistors and stand-up trimmers. All the rest I can replace with equivalent parts.

Also, the jacks and pots are all off-board mounted. Only the DC jack is board mounted (and was cut away from the PCB which is why I want to re-do it)

Thanks!

Go to a place with a high resolution scanner. Kinkos might have one. You need 600dpi or better.

Put the PCB copper side down onto the scanner.

Take the file home and put it in Photoshop, GIMP, or any other image editing program.

Convert to black and white.

The PCB should be a flat color. Select a bucket tool and dump white into it. Or, if the traces look particularly pale, dump black into it. Use the contrast and brightness to get the traces as close to a flat color as possible (you want the opposite of whatever you converted the PCB color to). Use a bucket tool on that now to fill it in as much as possible. The point is to get the traces the opposite color of the PCB material.

Now comes the time consuming part. There are going to be imperfect spots, places where the bucket tool didn't fill in. You have to go through with a pencil or paintbrush tool and smooth out all the traces.

Now you can etch the PCB. Just make the image whatever polarity it needs to be.

It will probably take about 3 hours.

Did you use the part numbers listed on the BOM?  ;-)

Was that in the fine print? 

Hmm, I'll have to double check and get back to you.

You didn't use carbon comp SMT resistors did you?

Now way, glass resistors all the way!*


*Seriously, a dream of mine is to make a pedal with glass resistors, but I can't seem to convince the one guy I know who has some to sell me even a set for a rangemaster at any price.

It might have too much mojo for a nomojo!

Check the picture names.

Did you use the part numbers listed on the BOM?  ;-)

Was that in the fine print? 

Okay, whew, I was worried for a sec.

I mean, it sounds pretty good, but something just doesn't seem right about it.

I'd use the following in anything:

Their resistors are fine if you don't mind thin leads. They're the ONLY reasonable way to get small quantities. I don't know what anyone's problem with their resistors is.

Silicon diodes are all fine.

Most schottky diodes, except I think the BAT41s, which seem to have the wrong Fv. I get 1N5817s and 1N60Ps from them all the time.

Cheap, common transistors -- 2N3904, for instance. Their BC108s and 109s are the same newer production ones sold everywhere.

I cheap, common ICs -- I sincerely doubt you will ever find a fake 4558 or 072 in their stock. Their Burr Brown stuff has been real from what I've been able to gather, but obviously you have to be careful with higher-value stuff like that.

I badmouth their FETs, but the fact is if you just need a generic FET, for a buffer or something, most of the time it's fine. I think we've more or less decided that they're out of spec, rather than necessarily fake. The J201s for instance are mostly too low gain, but hey, there's a use for that -- test them and match them up to stock specs for other FETs. Just don't design an effect using their J201s (oops!). But they aren't any cheaper than reliable sources, so why bother?

There's nothing wrong with their box caps.

I've been unable to find anything wrong with their tantalum caps.

Their multilayer ceramics caps are fine. I use them all the time in my mini builds.

I like their sockets; their single in line ones are actually a better fit for transistors than ones I've gotten elsewhere and paid more for.

Their 4Site enclosures are the same thing you'd get elsewhere. But I get all my enclosures from PPP because it's just not that much more (a few bucks?) and they come powdercoated.

Their toggles are fine in my experience as long as you aren't reheating and resoldering a bunch. They're not mountain switches, but neither are anyone else's, and you're only paying a dollar instead of five.

I feel like it's easier to ask about a specific component than to pick and choose about stuff. But I recently stopped using Tayda for most stuff ... and it had more to do with them moving into PCBs and using the names of the projects they're cloning than the quality of parts. Even so, I just give most of my business to Smallbear now because why both having to think about whether something is going to work?

Everything's variable if you have a goal in mind or can identify what doesn't matter.

Don't have the right size tone cap? Recalculate the cutoffs with a calculator and see if it matters.

Don't have the right size input cap? A lot of times you can use a bigger value with no change in sound. Don't have the right output cap? Change the size of the volume pot.

And so forth.

Even better, break out the breadboard and see what you can make happen.

rich and swirly, just the range is limited

A different taper will be your friend. If you used linear tapers and it's still bunched up, try a reverse log for the speed.

The depth control is a little different, though a different taper will also help. Not that I've built more than a few phase effects like this to compare, but on the Harbinger at least, the effect is really only produced when the depth gets quite high, so there's not nearly as much range on the depth as on the speed. It'll probably always sound like there's no effect until suddenly there is. I used a linear taper on mine, but I don't think even a reverse log would have helped this situation.

All of the above.

Usually I only sell stuff I made for me if I have multiples of that circuit lying around or if I really just don't think I'll ever use it. Everything else I sell is custom work, often one-ofs.

I keep a lot of stuff in the event I know it's the right sound for a recording, but realistically I can get almost every effect I could want out of my pedalboard and maybe three or four other pedals (filter stuff, mostly), so if I were only keeping things I'd actually use I'd probably have no more than 10 pedals in the house.

I get mine from Mouser.

Smallbear carries the LM13600. In some designs you won't notice the difference (I can't hear anything different in the Engineer's Thumb, for instance). However, I've noticed that the trivibe sounds specifically better with the 13600 despite the extra noise. The one I built with an 13700 is too bright.