batten down the hatches.
Russian MP38A for Q3. The gain pot on the MOSFET is hardwired to the max setting, and the treble is a trimpot since I put it pretty close to max and just leave it there all the time. This one's been sitting around for a while waiting for the right box, which turned out to be Red Starlight from PPP. But I think the powder coat actually bled a little. It made for a cool effect on the white glass outline. Sounds just like my bigger one!
The Blue Warbler I built for Josh (Gtr2), from the recent auction. Very flattered he asked me to build this even though he could have asked me to design something completely new. The birds spell out the first two measures of Cohen's "Bird on a Wire."
I waited to post this until I knew it had arrived safely.
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And noooowwww..... umm, I think I might have a problem.
So I've been working on a lot of compressors recently. And every time I breadboarded one, I ended up soldering it to perfboard to clear my breadboard, and because these were pretty cheap to make so there was really reason not to. And then they just started piling up ... so I decided to box them up. Then after I'd prepped a couple enclosures, I decided to do another cupcake. Unfortunately, this meant that I .... ran out of 3mm LED bezels and I now I have one more Cupcake (the Hartman clone I soldered up a while back) waiting to be finished. More bezels incoming from Tayda, probably end of the week. So here goes.
FETa Salad Compressor: Circuit Salad's Opto-FET compressor. It's a bit like an orange squeezer in the overall character of the sound, but it's also its own thing. I'm not completely happy with it (it distorts on the lowest comp settings), but it was cool enough to keep around and I had already soldered it to the switch and DC jack while I did some testing and just didn't feel like desoldering it again. The board is a bit of a mess because I modded it twice after it was "done."
Lemon Zester: Cupcake with gain mod. It's a 2.7K in series with a 10K pot in place of R9. 1.5K is about the lowest you can go without distortion or oscillation; but that was just more compression than I'd ever use. I really, really like this mod -- it's insanely good. Mark Hammer's original mod was to use a 6.8K in series with a 25K pot, but I found that to not be terribly useful on the lower comp settings. Basically you have to underbias the effect to get above unity on the lower gain settings; this in turn means that the highest comp settings just don't compress more than you'd get by biasing it correctly and using a fixed resistor. The Orange Squeezer is subtle enough -- why would I want to make it LESS subtle? With the values I used, you can get a MIGHTY boost but also some really hard comp even with low output pickups, all with the really good decay & attack characteristics and character of an OS. I love messing with this circuit, it has so many movable parts.
Copper Crush: A Rothwell Lovesqueeze clone. I had messed around with the circuit a bit on the breadboard, trying to extend its range some, bit in the end decided to solder it up stock. It's a really good, but subtle, transparent compressor/boost. This box is right about the time that I ran out of clearcoat ....
And finally ...
Bearhug compressor: WHAT IS IT? Stay tuned. This is my newest design and I'll be posting it in the Members Projects and Tutorials section in the morning. I will tell you it uses some principals from the Lovesqueeze and a well-worn/well-loved booster, that it sounds frigging awesome, and that it might get a PCB run.
