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Absolutely love the theme! Excellent idea and execution!

Graphics and guts both look nice!

An "ugly proof" filter sounds nice. I generally like more options, except when it comes to auto-wah and compression.

Thanks, guys! I think I got all the parts form Tayda for this build. The green indicator knobs caught my attention, and I've always been a sucker for pastels.

I decided to try my hand at surface mount and this was one of the few projects I could find. It's a faithful recreation of the Benson Preamp. The circuit is pretty ugly proof, but it also doesn't have that much personality—at least not in my rig. I understand it's based on the preamp section of a Benson amp and I could see how the circuit would work well as a fairly neutral pedal platform amp. As an overdrive, it just doesn't have much personality. I word of caution; with this wide layout, the jacks are too close together to accommodate pancake jacks. 







All in all it was fun to experiment with SMD. This is a nice circuit, it just isn't what I'm looking for in an overdrive right now.

The original Rat uses a JFET as a buffer between the tone control and the volume control, so using the second opamp as a non-inverting buffer would be the closest to the original Rat. The original has plenty of output, so additional gain at this stage probably isn't necessary unless you are using germanium diodes, or something else with a low forward voltage.

Any non-inverting stage will need a resistor to VR at the input.

The reference voltage acts as a virtual ground, so there shouldn't be much of a difference in function between dumping things to VR and ground. Sometimes dumping to VR means you can save a decoupling capacitor. (Hopefully, I explained that clearly. Please let me know if I didn't.)

Really digging the base in the pre-chorus. That melodic, floaty, high stuff always gets me.

Alrighty then, yellow means phasor now. Suck it, BOSS! Your SD, OS, and OD pedals are now mis-colored.

Nice work!

I need to finish up my Glasshole. I ended up accidentally ordering 1/8W sized resistors a while back, which were actually rated at 1/4W...haven't tried ordering proper 1/8W in a while, to be honest. Are they really getting thin on the ground?

Maybe it's not the conventional phaser color...but would you really want a brown or green bananafanafophasor? I wouldn't. 

The only place I was able to find appropriately sized 1/8w resistors was from Tayda and they didn't have 4k7 in stock. I had to use 5k1 in the all-pass filter stages. It doesn't effect the sound, so it's fine. The only other 1/8w resistors I could find were SMD or some weird mil-spec things that were the size of regular 1/4w resistors.

This turned out to be an expensive pedal as I had difficulty sourcing all the parts. 1/8w resistors have become difficult to find! Still, it's a fun build and a great sounding phaser.



The small LED is the rate indicator. I jumped the pins of the rotary switch so that the LED works no matter how many stages are selected. I accidentally made more work for myself by placing both LED's under the PCB. There is essentially no clearance, but a little electrical tape keeps things from shorting out. I tested a few different colors and found that LEDs with higher forward voltages don't work consistently as rate indicators: red and yellow are fine, blue and green are not.



This is a very chewy phaser, which can be a lot of fun, but, like most phasers, it's incapable of subtlety and can mask the sound of the guitar. I added an "Intensity" switch to combat this. In the down position R8 is the stock 10k. In the up position, R8 is 20k. This reduces the phased signal getting mixed into the output, which effectively halves the depth of the phase cancellations. It still sounds like a phaser—just less intense.

I also found that I could stop the LFO and get a "parked" sound by connecting leg 3 of the Depth control to the 9v rail. The brightness of the internal LED could then be controlled with the Depth knob, allowing me to tune the phase effect. This only gave me access to about half the range of the phaser and only the first half of the Depth's rotation really did anything, so I decided not to implement it. Maybe someone more clever than me can find a better implementation of this.

All in all, a very good circuit. It does classic phaser sounds. Eight stage phasing allows you to get flanger-like sounds. Two-stage phasing with low depth and intensity sounds somewhat Leslie-like. There are lots of good sounds to be found.

Beta lead is now class D. 
So it's a pedal into a fender rumble...
I know the clipping and tone stack are 90% of the sound of that amp but flipping the amp topologies and tubes around just screams limited R&D rebadge.
"Ok, Greg will work Tuesdays and every other Thursday for the next 3 months to relaunch SUNN."

I don't know what the power section of the originals was like, but class D is probably an improvement. Should be more efficient and lighter weight. That said, it's probably more cost effective to build an AionFX PCB (or someone else's) and run it through your Fender rumble.

So glad to hear your feeling better! I hope the driver's license doesn't become a logistical issue for you. 

Make sure that you know and like the two circuits before you put them in one enclosure. I had put two different overdrives or one boost and one overdrive or two boosts in one box, but tastes change and I only ended up using one. Luckily, I got those sold.
Currently on my board are these 2-in-1s:
dual compressor (DOD 280 and RottenKomp)
Green Ringer + ZVex Machine (great noise combination)
Silicon Fuzz Face + Silicon Tonebender Mk2
LPB1 + Naga Viper
Runoffgroove TriVibe + STM Tremolo

To build on this idea, finding circuits that you like and that would benefit from switching options make for good multi builds: order switches with gain stages, maybe the option to put a reverb in the loop of a delay in addition to after. Those sorts of options add value to a mutli build.

Looks really good, especially given the drama with the labels! I never would have guessed. Do you find yourself favoring one channel over the other?

Awesome execution! Bet this would be great parallel to the right fuzz as well.
Almost hits some Homme tones at times as well.
I've never cared for the RAT circuit much, and honestly avoided it, because of what I can only call it's "nasal" tone. It feels like it's nagging at me. But this seems to add overtones to the nagging 2k and is much more palatable.

The Rat is quite nasal! That works well in some situations, but it's nice to be able to dial that back. I have a dual/parallel fuzz in the pipeline, but that'll be based loosely on a fuzz face and harmonic percolator.

Got this one all breadboarded up and boy oh boy this one's a keeper!

Very well done indeed, good sir!

I'll also have to look up that mod for the Rat you mentioned.

I'm glad you like it! I'd love to see a build report when you get it boxed up!

The Ruetz mod is included in the Slow Loris as the "Sweep" knob. The "Focus" knob on the Otolith does essentially the same thing, but the values are tuned differently and the knob works in the opposite direction, cutting lows as you turn it up instead of increasing them.

If you're looking to get further into "doomy mess" territory, you could try decreasing the 47k resistor that connects to pin 3 of the LM386. It forms a voltage divider with a 50k resistor inside the chip, so reducing this value will cause the LM386 input to clip sooner.  You could also increase the saturation of the first stage by increasing the 15k resistor in the feedback loop. If you go this route, you may need to decrease the 1nF capacitor that's in parallel; the low pass filter is already pretty aggressive to keep things from getting fizzy.

Cheers!

I was really expecting this to be a doomy mess but was very pleasantly surprised at the sounds you're getting.  BIG at all times but with nuance too.  Very slick.

Thank you for the compliment! This circuit went through quite a few revisions. Each revision had more and more low-pass filtering to tame fizziness and less and less gain from the initial gain stage. I wanted to be right at "doomy mess" with everything on ten, but be able to dial it back to something more articulate.