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Haven't posted anything in a while, so here's a mini I just made for a customer, probably the last micro klone I'll do, especially since the Apis is sold out:



OA128 diodes, to match his Mythic Overdrive. I offered OA126 but he still wanted the 128! Wuddaguy!  Nothing else particularly special about it. The customer came up with the name. So it's Pagliacci after he kills his lady love at the end. I used Pavarotti for the model because frankly I thought his performance was better than the others I found. Conceivably, Caruso was better (he was one of the first to perform the role), but the recordings doen't reflect it.

Pretty sure the boutique guitar pedal industry would not have any LED indicators if they couldn't have those blinding things.

Or just read the blog post if you want some juicy details about writing songs about astronomy and how little gear actually got used on the recording.

http://midwayfair.org/2014/09/10/song-sources-most-distant-star/

Just a bit of fun with the recording interface. Everything recorded through the Sennheiser MK4 I got earlier this year. I "played" all of the "instruments" on this.

[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/jon-patton-3/call-me-al-paul-simon-cover[/soundcloud]

(And goddamn the instrumentation in this is complicated for such a simple song.)

Here are my demos of a couple weird modulation effects.

New CD proof copy day!

Rob comes up with some clever projects (lightwah!), but I think this is his first PCB project. Here's the link:

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=108355.0

My band's had a few gigs in the past where my feeling running up was pretty much "We have this show. It will be good. Yay." Whereas the one we've got tonight is basically, "I would make plans weeks in advance to go to this show even if I wasn't playing." It's not at an "important" venue (meaning it's just a good local music place, not some "checkmark" on the resume), the pay is likely to be bad, and I have no idea what attendance will be like. It's not a release show, or really for any special occasion. It's all down to the people we're playing with in a place I feel really comfortable playing.

I've had plenty of shows where we got paid decent money for playing in a venue I don't like much. Or shows where I loved the venue but wasn't excited about the other bands on the bill.

It's just nice when something comes together exactly how you want it. I wish I could do a show like this five nights a week.

http://www.eastwoodguitars.com/sidejack-bass-vi-black/

I don't know what I'd do with it, but it's awesome.

I was sure this was a bass guitar, but it also sounds like it's got some synth stuff going on. I can't get there with any of the envelope filters I've got here. It's really obvious at the breakdown:

I almost always seem to sneak one in on any recording project, because when it's right there's nothing else that works as well. Right now I'm mixing a song by an alt-country guy I've been playing with, and he had this section where he does blank strums his guitar (you know what I mean, like a snare sound). Sounded kinda pedestrian for a creepy song, so I reversed it, cut it up into sixteen pieces, put a reverse reverb on it, and matched up each strum manually to the forward section. Sounds awesome, kind of like the reverse snare sound on Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins stuff.

The dude's got a voice that sounds like he smokes 80 packs a day and some killer lyrics, too. This line kills me: "Pine box stretch's the rest a man gets." His name's Stephen Lee if you want to check him out. Hopefully we'll have a little EP recorded by he autumn. (I'm basically playing everything except the guitar and vocals.)

Anyone have any favorite studio tricks they want to share?

http://www.smallbearelec.com/servlet/Detail?no=1580

Just in case anyone missed it or is looking for a real in-spec part for their Harbinger. Maybe a year or two Smallbear noticed (and got complaints about) the Silonex 7532 photocells, which no longer had the super high dark resistance they used to have.

Granted it's 200M after 5 seconds, but it should easily get to several megs on a medium speed in a tremolo or something.

If I get some, I'll also end up testing them in the Cardinal, which might make things a little cheaper for folks balking at $7-$10 each for the 5C1s.

Oh, and he also got some interesting germanium diodes:
-1N100s in if you're building a replica Orange Squeezer, though I'd still recommend a decent Schottky there.
-A couple "transistor" style Ge diode packages with super low Fv

So sometime on Sunday evening, I noticed a buzz while playing through the new amp.

I went absolutely nuts looking for it. I mean, I tried everything, including sticking my fingers into the back of the speaker cone, isolating unused pins in the tube sockets ...

My friend Keith came over yesterday early for game night and helped me out. Keith has an engineer's brain and was able scientifically eliminate every possible cause of the buzz until we had eliminated even the amp itself and just brought another amp into the practice room ...

At which point I discovered that it was the room (looks like I need some more stuff for dampening!) and not the amp.

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I feel like I wasted four hours of my life searching for a problem where it didn't exist. On the other, I think it's cool that systematic elimination of the causes led to us finding the real source of the noise, and I am immensely relieved that it wasn't something in the cabinet or speaker.

Chris had several circuitboards and very little time to box them, so we worked out a trade.

He really liked the Ghost Black from Pedal Parts Plus, so I obtained a few enclosures with that color ...



Oooh, scary!

Boneyard + one-knob Fatpants with an order switcher:


I built the Fatpants PCB (just altered my perf layout to omit the charge pump), but Chris (or someone else he got it from) built the Boneyard PCB.

I used a Fatpants instead of the on-board boost switch from the Boneyard. The rest of the +18V conversion for the FP is hiding under the PCB, as is an input buffer running off an isolated voltage. Unfortunately, I was still unable to get the Boneyard perfect and howl-free after working on it for a week. I tried everything under the sun to get rid of the whine, and though I knocked it down substantially with the additional filtering, I was still forced to limit the tone pot and volume knob range to make it easier to avoid a setting that howls. The Fatpants side sounds great, though, as usual. I used a 2SK170 this time. There wasn't room for more than the one pot, and the extra switch made it symmetrical, so the Fat pot is inside, set at 2/3 of the way up and then rebiased accordingly.

Chris had some more ideas, so hopefully this monster will be right in the future. I felt bad sending it to him without it being perfect, though, I've never had to do that before.



I didn't populate the PCB, but someone had already done the sensitivity pot. I changed it to my preference of a 50K pot with a minimum instead of the 100K pot that was already there, but that's it really. Sounds like an Afterlife, of course. The 5C3 does make a tiny difference from my preference of a 5C1, but that's it.



Chris again built the PCB, but I finished populating it. I put in a pair of OA126 in place of the silicon diodes just to be cheeky, and OA1160 for the germanium. I used a 1458 for IC1 as I thought it sounded the best out of what I had on hand, and the lack of top end really helps keep some clarity. I was pretty impressed by the clarity in this circuit, actually, though I thought the switches weren't terribly useful when the gain gets higher ... and I can't figure out the point of switching in a blue LED in parallel with a red LED, especially when the blue LED has a limiting resistor. It could have just been blue LEDs on all the time and switched in a red one to do something actually useful. It's just another one of those booteek design choices that are 

Lexa (my wife) crocheted the battery holder.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/28zl8u/we_are_strymon_designers_and_builders_of_effects/

There are some typical market-y answers, but also some really interesting technical ones, too. The whole team was involved, so you get a broad swath. It's worth a look even if it's not on the level of the AskScience AMAs.

Most of us use an amp, even if we're not here for building them. I figure at the very least, it would be nice to have a place where all those amp questions can go (what's this tube, what's a good amp for these pedals, etc.).

But we've had several member-posted amp projects, too, and Bean's had some submini tube projects on the bench for a couple years (that we might one day get to build!).

So what say ye?

I've gots it.

Here's the thing, though: It's in a two-in-one with a Fatpants, and even with the fatpants in line first, the howl is just as bad -- making me speculate that an input buffer isn't going to help.

I'm seeing lots of suggested fixes for it, but almost nothing that actually pinpoints the CAUSE of the problem And all the suggestions to add a buffer to the circuit ... Why? The first op amp stage IS a buffer and nothing else. Is the oscillation somehow inherent in using the same IC for the input section as for the gain section? Is it a power filtering issue (it looks like there might not be enough in this circuit)? Is it maybe the ceramic caps being piezo microphonic?

Isn't that a low pass filter? How does increasing a low-pass filter decrease the bass?

I am le confused.

Afterlife (this was his favorite!):
http://www.ovnilab.com/reviews/after.shtml

Bearhug:
http://www.ovnilab.com/reviews/bearhug.shtml

Engineer's Thumb:
http://www.ovnilab.com/reviews/thumb.shtml