Here's my MadBean Boneyard in a remarkably flaw-free Mammoth Vintage Orangle Sparkle Translucent 1590BB. The Bypass footswitch operates a red LED on the left, the Gain footswitch switches between Crunch (Green LED) and Crush (Blue LED) modes on the right. The toggle switch is for symmetric or asymmetric clipping, and is just a DPDT On/On with either a jumper or another red LED for D4. I did a half-gain mod (R5=100R, C5=1u), as I thought full gain was just too much. I also included the low-pass filter on the output, as this is a very bright circuit.
(http://matthewwhitworth.com/fxbox2011/TooMuchAwesome-face.jpg)
I gotta admit, I love how this came out. I'm happy with the look, and I'm thrilled with the sound. Haven't used it in a rehearsal setting yet, but I plan to give it a spin later this week.
I'll post the gut shot and some gruesome details a little later this morning.
Now the ugly bits. As some of you may know, a few weeks back there were several threads about a high pitched whine in the new Boneyard PCB. I breadboarded the circuit at maximum gain and didn't have any whine. So I built the board (half-gain, as above) and mounted it in a spare 1590BB that I had laying around -- still no whine. Finally, my sparkly orange 1590BB arrived, I transferred it to that...and WHINE CITY.
I was pretty upset and, frankly, embarrassed. I had made a lot of posts saying that I hadn't had the problem that EVERYBODY was having, and now here it was. I only had the whine in bridge-pickup-only postion and even then, only with my tone knob at about 100%. The only thing I can think is that maybe I had the tone rolled off a bit when I was testing it in the other enclosure.. (Like I said, it's a trebly circuit, and I do tend to roll back the tone on my tele when I use it.) I had tested the breadboarded circuit for a couple of weeks and at maximum gain, so I'm pretty sure the circuit itself is sound, but I may have only tested the finished, but not fully housed board for an hour or so.
Luckily, several other people had done a lot of work on fixing the whine. Based on reports that a grounded shield between R1/C1 and R4/C4 had diminished the noise, I wondered if the parallel components from the high gain stage feedback loop and the input might be causing the problem. I actually lifted the input of R1 and moved it to the same input pad as the pull-down resistor (effectively standing it up and making it perpendicular to R4), but that didn't fix it. So then I bent C1 down away from C4 and over the top of RPD, but that didn't fix it.
I also remembered that some people had reported that placing another effect in front of the Boneyard effectively killed the whine, so I placed my BOSS TU-2 tuner in-line and...BINGO! Whine gone! The always-on BOSS buffer effectively killed it. This was great news because I always have the buffered tuner at the front of my chain, but I still wanted the effect to work okay by itself, so I decided to add a buffer to the circuit input.
I spent several days reading about and breadboarding buffers. Beavis, Jack Orman, etc. I originally built a Klon buffer, which I liked just fine, but I eventually settled on a JFET buffer using a 2n5457. I moved it over to a Radio Shack board, crammed it into the space I was originally going to use for a battery, clipped and reattached some wires et voilà:
(http://matthewwhitworth.com/fxbox2011/TooMuchAwesome-guts.jpg)
Now that's a build report. Great job inside and out! I'll give the boneyard a go with your improvements. If you don't mind can you post a schematic of the buffer you used. Is there any particular reason you choose the JFET? Could you hear a substantial difference in the different buffers?
I kinda combined one of Jack Orman's designs with the General Guitar Gadgets JFET buffer (http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/pdf/ggg_buffer_jfet_sc.pdf) (which is probably based on Jack's to begin with). I changed the input cap (C1) to 220n and the output cap (C2) to 4.7u as I thought the stock GGG values were affecting the lows a little bit.
I went with the JFET version just because I thought it was simpler. It takes a tiny smidge of gain (and maybe a bit of treble) off the signal, and I thought that was fine in this circuit. I think the differences in all the buffers I built came down to the following:
- IC's get you closer to unity gain than JFETS or BJT's.
- Make sure you design to get the input and output impedances you want.
- Adjust caps to taste.
I also wondered about noise tolerance, especially since this was going to sit in front of a high gain circuit, but I didn't notice any significant noise from any of the buffers I tried. I even used a tantalum cap on C2 and didn't hear anything bad, but then again my ears are pretty shot. The gain loss from the JFET (as compared to the IC) made it difficult to A/B. It was slight, but definitely noticeable. And of course once you roll off the gain a bit, it's more noticeable in the treble, so there's a temptation to think that there's less treble in the JFET circuit. I dunno. Maybe there is, but it certainly didn't hurt the Boneyard.
I went back and forth between an MPF102 (R4=3k3) and a 2N5457 (R4=10K). In the end I thought the 2N5457 was a bit more transparent, but honestly that might have just been a gain difference.
I also did a crap job of visualizing how my buffer board was going to sit in my enclosure. I would've laid it out a bit differently if I would've gotten that straight in my head first before I started soldering.
The insides of this thing certainly leave something to be desired, but I was just happy I didn't scratch up the outside with all the disassembly and reassembly.
Looks fantastic!!! I'll be shure to follow your advice when I finally get to boxing up my Boneyard. And, like you, I have a buffered pedal at the beginning of my FX chain (Korg DT10 tuner), so it'll probably work out fine. Thanks so much for all your troubles in making this work!!!
Paul
Great job figuring out the buffer and whine dealio. Awesome name for the pedal and your advice too.
Thanks
Sweet! Great name. Love the color as well.
Josh
Thanks, everyone. Here's a direct shot of the front.
(http://matthewwhitworth.com/fxbox2011/tma-face2.jpg)
Notice how uneven the knobs are. It's keeping me up nights. ;)
Great build report! Not every day I learn that much from looking at the pretty pictures. :)
Thanks, too, for the really thorough explanation of the buffer.
Yeah, great build report. I'll keep all of that in mind when I ever get around to boxing up my Boneyard.
That orange sparkle looks fantastic. I wish I had ordered one of those when I placed a Mammoth order the other day.
The built itself looks good, too. I like the labeling you do on your pedals. Simple, but effective.
Awesome job mgwhit. Love the finish and layout. Glad you found a method to deal with the squeel.
Thanks again for all your help with my Boneyard build as well! Long live the Boneyard ;D
Dude this looks great! I love it...I'm curious if the buffer by itself would take care of the whine completely without altering the original circuit.
I'm also curious about the older Boneyard layout...I know a few people were reporting whine with the older as well but I've built 2 (one with the first version and another with the new version) and I had to whine problem like the ones I got with the new...
This is circuit is such a mystery that I love it haha I'm intrigued by it...we'll get it down people! :D
-K
Thanks, Kaleb. Your original demo was what turned me on to this circuit in the first place!
All of the buffer circuits I tried killed the whine dead before I even touched the components on the board: BOSS pedal, Klon IC buffer (with several op-amps), and JFET buffers with 2N5457 or MPF102. An IC buffer like the Klon preserves the most gain and is probably the most transparent. I wired mine up so that it is only inline when the effect is switched on. The pedal is still true bypass, although you could choose to wire it either way.
I don't know if the buffers work because they roll off some extreme high end or because the lower impedance renders the input less susceptible to cross-over. I assume the latter, but I am not an EE, and only barely know what I'm talking about. I only monkeyed with R1 and C1 after I knew I had a workable buffer solution available.
I should add that the input buffer is not necessarily the solution to fixing this board, but it is certainly a solution.
Hi all, I'm new to this forum but I've been following a few threads and this one in particular as I have also built this pedal for myself recently. I used the original a few months ago and I loved it so I waned to make me this one.
Now I love how this pedal sounds but I have also run into the high pitch whine problem. I noticed that moving or touching dome of the wiring killed the whine. So I suspect it might be a layout problem. I let a friend of mine borrow it for two weeks and told him to roll off the treble in his guitar to temporarily cure it. I will work on it as soon as I get it back.
I don't know if you guys noticed that this pedal already has an input buffer according to the schematics. So it might be just a matter of adding a small bypass capacitor(47p or so) at the input or at different stages. I'll try some theories I have and post my findings. Usually high gain circuits as this should have a very short gain loop, so it might be the traces on the PCB as well contributing. If input and output traces are too close, that will cause all the feed back or oscillations.
Well sorry for the extra long first post. I just want to give something back to this great forum where I have learned so many different things.
Quote from: Strider0007 on August 08, 2012, 08:13:47 AM
Hi all, I'm new to this forum but I've been following a few threads and this one in particular as I have also built this pedal for myself recently. I used the original a few months ago and I loved it so I waned to make me this one.
Now I love how this pedal sounds but I have also run into the high pitch whine problem. I noticed that moving or touching dome of the wiring killed the whine. So I suspect it might be a layout problem. I let a friend of mine borrow it for two weeks and told him to roll off the treble in his guitar to temporarily cure it. I will work on it as soon as I get it back.
This has received a lot of discussion in another thread (or two). I'm not sure what you mean by "dome of the wiring", but another builder noticed that running a grounded shield between R4/C4 and R1/C1 killed off a good deal of the whine. My own attempts to reroute R1 didn't seem to make much of a difference.
Quote from: Strider0007 on August 08, 2012, 08:13:47 AM
I don't know if you guys noticed that this pedal already has an input buffer according to the schematics. So it might be just a matter of adding a small bypass capacitor(47p or so) at the input or at different stages. I'll try some theories I have and post my findings. Usually high gain circuits as this should have a very short gain loop, so it might be the traces on the PCB as well contributing. If input and output traces are too close, that will cause all the feed back or oscillations.
Yeah, the buffer I added is totally redundant to the circuit itself, but I think the on-board input buffer (IC1B) might be where the whine is leaking in in the first place. I agree with you about a low value cap to ground potentially working -- especially since a little treble roll-off on the guitar seems to fix it -- but at the time I wanted to get a known good solution in place fast. A well designed low-pass filter would certainly be less intrusive than my solution. My pedal is temporarily on someone else's board, so I'll leave that as an exercise for someone else.
Quote from: Strider0007 on August 08, 2012, 08:13:47 AM
Well sorry for the extra long first post. I just want to give something back to this great forum where I have learned so many different things.
Always good to have another person working on it. Welcome to the forum!
That looks super cool! Question: Did you use waterslide decals for the labeling?
Thank you! And, yes, almost all of my builds use powdercoated enclosures (typically from Pedal Parts Plus, but some from Mammoth) with a laser printer clear waterslide decal and several layers of clear enamel. I've been sticking to black lately (mainly because my printer is B&W), but I'm planning a series of color ones this Fall.
Thanks for posting up the report. I had similar whining issues with the boneyard so I left it up in the shelf till a solution came up for it. I stuck a boss CE5 in front of it yesterday after reading this thread and problem solved.
Any change you could post up a diagram or pics of what you did in your buffer?
Thanks and great work!
Quote from: Hangingmonkey on August 09, 2012, 06:49:13 AM
Any change you could post up a diagram or pics of what you did in your buffer?
As per my previous post, it's just the GGG JFET Buffer with a couple of changed cap values. Google "vero JFET buffer" and you'll find better layouts than mine. I just used the Radio Shack IC board because that's what I had laying around.
Quote from: mgwhit on August 09, 2012, 02:11:48 PM
Quote from: Hangingmonkey on August 09, 2012, 06:49:13 AM
Any change you could post up a diagram or pics of what you did in your buffer?
As per my previous post, it's just the GGG JFET Buffer with a couple of changed cap values. Google "vero JFET buffer" and you'll find better layouts than mine. I just used the Radio Shack IC board because that's what I had laying around.
Just an FYI, I have a Boneyard in process and the only thing that cut the whine was putting a buffer in front of it.
Hey all and mgwhit.
I used the C5/R5 method to fix my BY whine issue - and it worked, however I'm experience this weird presence - most notably on the High Gain channel that sounds like the pedal is almost gonna go into oscillation. Like if I play a chord and then choke it, there is this underlying presence - like a trebly/wah sound. Its hard to explain.. Has anyone experienced/heard any thing like that? I'll have to keep listening to it to better describe it.
Quote from: Beedoola on September 04, 2012, 09:39:30 AM
I used the C5/R5 method to fix my BY whine issue - and it worked, however I'm experience this weird presence - most notably on the High Gain channel that sounds like the pedal is almost gonna go into oscillation. Like if I play a chord and then choke it, there is this underlying presence - like a trebly/wah sound. Its hard to explain.. Has anyone experienced/heard any thing like that? I'll have to keep listening to it to better describe it.
I don't think that the C5/R5 method truly fixes the issue enough. I'm guessing you're still getting some oscillation, but it's just not getting totally out of control. What values did you use?
Quote from: mgwhit on September 04, 2012, 12:39:59 PM
Quote from: Beedoola on September 04, 2012, 09:39:30 AM
I used the C5/R5 method to fix my BY whine issue - and it worked, however I'm experience this weird presence - most notably on the High Gain channel that sounds like the pedal is almost gonna go into oscillation. Like if I play a chord and then choke it, there is this underlying presence - like a trebly/wah sound. Its hard to explain.. Has anyone experienced/heard any thing like that? I'll have to keep listening to it to better describe it.
I don't think that the C5/R5 method truly fixes the issue enough. I'm guessing you're still getting some oscillation, but it's just not getting totally out of control. What values did you use?
This. The C5/R5 method made no difference for me. Putting a buffer is the only thing that worked. I first confirmed by putting a buffered Klon pedal in front of it, then wired a direct one like you suggested.
Quote from: Beedoola on September 04, 2012, 09:39:30 AM
Hey all and mgwhit.
I used the C5/R5 method to fix my BY whine issue - and it worked, however I'm experience this weird presence - most notably on the High Gain channel that sounds like the pedal is almost gonna go into oscillation. Like if I play a chord and then choke it, there is this underlying presence - like a trebly/wah sound. Its hard to explain.. Has anyone experienced/heard any thing like that? I'll have to keep listening to it to better describe it.
I've gotten that sort of sound on the high gain. The only way I could get rid of it was to put a buffer before it. I used a Klon buffer and it works like a charm now. Worked on two of them.
ahh yes. I had a Klone but sold it to a friend. I just put my Boss RV-5 first i my chain and the sound went away. I was also getting some light feedback as well on the High Gain side. I may have to build a Kingslayer for a bummer heh
MG - did you put the buffer before the circuit In or the Input Jack In? - in the latter case, with the buffer always being in the signal path. I built a Klon buffer and it fixed the feedback/mild oscillation noise but now I'm getting switch pop for the Boneyard and all the pedals after it.
I put mine between the foot switch and the Bone yard circuit, so that it is only in the chain when the effect is activated.
I put mine in front of the switch (always on) and it hasn't given me any problems, so you might want to check something.
Quote from: mgwhit on September 06, 2012, 01:15:36 AM
I put mine between the foot switch and the Bone yard circuit, so that it is only in the chain when the effect is activated.
cool, I rewired it to this configuration and the switch pop went away. Thank you.
Hello guys,
I posted a while back I saying I was going to look into it and I just got my pedal back from my friend so I apologize for the delay and I just started looking into it earlier today.
So far it looks to be crosstalk from the high gain section being routed too close to the input (R4/R1) and that whole trace passes below all the input components all the way to pin1 of the IC(LF347). So I took out all input components(RPD,R1,R2,C1) except C2 and wired the input directly to that and it took the whine away until I set the vol to like 2-3 o'clock then it started to come back again.
Also looks like it needs shielded input wire.
So next I placed R1 soldered to one side of C2 and it still kills the whine but only until the vol reaches 2-3 o'clock position.
I'm going to experiment a lil more later and post my findings. If it's not getting anywhere after that I'll just etch my own PCB to see if that solves it. I would like to build this without the extra buffer circuit but it might not be worth the effort considering how simple it is to just add a buffer in front of it as it has been mentioned here. I'm just determined to find out why it's oscillating I guess...lol
Hello mgwhit. Re-read this post from the beginning and was curious to know what exact buffer you used in the build. I have a few on vero, including jfet and a klon buffer. If you have had good luck with your's I would like to just build it and throw it in my BY.
I have done all the mods (with your and other's help) and for the most part, the whine is tamed; however, I still get some occasional bouts with certain pickups/guitars. My P-90 equipped tele really sets off the whine in high gain mode. I think its time to end this once and for all with a buffer ;D
How about the attached vero, would this work out ok or maybe you could attach yours
I'm sure that would work fine. I posted a link to the GGG buffer schematic somewhere on page 1 of this thread, which is very close to what i did and almost identical to the one you've posted. I think I doubled the input and output cap vales just to make sure I wasn't losing any low end, and I used a 2n5457 because I thought it had better noise specs than a j201. (Is that even true?). Once you change the jfet, you need to change r5 to bias it properly. I used 10K with the 2n5457. I might have done something else, but I can't remember and it honestly doesn't matter. I'm pretty sure any high-input-impedance/low-output-impedance buffer will do the trick. If you're unsure, breadboard it first. Good luck!
Oops I did not see that post. I think I will breadboard a few options and see what fits. I hope to preserve the highs in the boneyard for my rig.
Well I tried some other things with this circuit and none completely got rid of the whine. So I put and old BOSS tubescreamer I had laying around before the boneyard and that also did not completely remove the whine, so not even a buffer in from gets rid of it on mine. I might have to do the half gain mod for this to work but I did want the high gain of the original to work :( Well I'm sorry I couldn't find the real cause of the problem. I don't if I should spend any more time on this or just put the buffer and be happy with the higher range(b4 oscillation occurs) I can get out of that or spend my time on a different layout instead.
Well thank you for all the info mgwhit and all others who have tried to solve the problem.
I would go ahead and do the C5/R5 mod and maybe drop the high gain pot down to 250k-500k. You won't really notice a big drop in gain but it did help the whine in mine and some others on here. I think the mod still retains all the high-gain compression and sag. socket them and give it a try.
I breadboarded a few buffers per mgwhit's advice and settled on a simple klon buffer as it sounded the most transparent with my setup compared to the jfet buffer. It ABSOLUTELY kills all whine, whistle, screech, howl, etc with all guitars at loud volumes.
I tested stock r5/c5 values also with perfect results although I changed them back to 100r and 1uf as I like the gain sweep better. I will post my results in the Mods section. Thanks again mgwhit and others.
(http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/227/boneyardgutswbuffer.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/706/boneyardgutswbuffer.jpg/)
Uploaded with ImageShack.us (http://imageshack.us)
Nice! That's a much better job than I did.
Quote from: Strider0007 on September 08, 2012, 01:11:18 AM
Hello guys,
I posted a while back I saying I was going to look into it and I just got my pedal back from my friend so I apologize for the delay and I just started looking into it earlier today.
So far it looks to be crosstalk from the high gain section being routed too close to the input (R4/R1) and that whole trace passes below all the input components all the way to pin1 of the IC(LF347). So I took out all input components(RPD,R1,R2,C1) except C2 and wired the input directly to that and it took the whine away until I set the vol to like 2-3 o'clock then it started to come back again.
Also looks like it needs shielded input wire.
So next I placed R1 soldered to one side of C2 and it still kills the whine but only until the vol reaches 2-3 o'clock position.
I'm going to experiment a lil more later and post my findings. If it's not getting anywhere after that I'll just etch my own PCB to see if that solves it. I would like to build this without the extra buffer circuit but it might not be worth the effort considering how simple it is to just add a buffer in front of it as it has been mentioned here. I'm just determined to find out why it's oscillating I guess...lol
Here s a picture of an original plexitone if it can helps , it s a buffered circuit and it looks like shielded wire for input and output jacks .