1590a Lavach & Treble Booster, plus Cupcake with mods

[midwayfair]

I had the day off on Friday, and I also happened to finish the boxes for a few Madbean builds. So I spent the day filming demos of some of my new toys. There are some build notes on the videos (in the description and in annotations on the vids themselves), but I'll include a few notes here as well.


First, my little teapot, an NPN Rangemaster in a 1590a. I had a PTP circuit in there for a bit. Ironically, despite a smaller layout on perfboard, the Madbean board fit better because I could drape the taller components on either side of the output jack. Take a look:


Panasonic caps (input caps are .0047 and .033 blended by a 100K pot), with tantalums for the 47uFs. The transistor was one of a pair of unsorted ones I got from Smallbear that happened to bias perfectly at 59K and sounds really, really beautiful. I like it better than the tested ones I've gotten from them. I really couldn't be happier with the sound. (Well, I could. I would be ecstatic if I could get about a dozen more transistors exactly like it.) This was the third Rangemaster I built last month, but it's the only one that really made it into a box so far. I've got two more to build that are ... well, let's just say they'll barely be recognizable as treble boosters when I'm done. One's going to be the "Fat Mastered" or Falstaff Overdrive.

Demo:

Next up is the Lavache clone with all the diodes socketed. Nothing has really changed since my last post except ... now it's in a box! I should have learned La Marseillaise. Haw haw.




And the demo:

Finally - no demo with this yet, since I just finished it last night - here's my first Orange Squeezer, made from the VERY LAST Cupcake board. Brian must have found it under the couch or something.



My wife decorated the box. And yes, it "needs" an LED, as do the 1590a builds above. I leave my comp on all the time.

There are a few nonstandard values, and to help with my frequent inability to make final decisions when sockets are just so darned easy to add, I've socketed the C7, R11, and D1.

For C7, I tried everything between .68uF and 33uF (!), before I finally settled on 1uF. This is much smaller than the 4.7 that usually goes in there, but I wanted something different (I also own a Hartman Compressor, which I love, and which gives me really "normal" OS tones) and I liked that this had a faster attack. This gave me a little more OS quack/character even when the circuit was underbiased.

I ran through every diode in my possession and settled on the 1N270, which I've discovered are pure magic. I really wish I had a demo, because it sounds beautiful in the orange squeezer. It's a little brighter, and it also adds some very pleasant harmonics that just weren't there with the 1N34a. (Silicon diodes were all very boring in this slot.) I have a whole pile of these diodes, and after hearing them in this OS, I've been trying to find a use for them everywhere possible. They didn't work their magic in the Lavache, but I did find something cool for them in another distortion circuit. But that's a story for another time.

The 1N270 and 1uF cap resulted in a little less compression overall without going crazy with the bias. To make up for this, I raised R11 to a 150K. This increases the decay time just a tiny bit. I tried some other values there (330K, which had just a tough of bloom, and 470K, which was just too dark and woofy).

[gtr2]

Great builds.  +nice guitars 

Josh

[nzCdog]

Cool artwork man... Love it!

[vertigo]

Hi,
I have a question about your Lil teapot., 5 years later.
Your version sounds very great, i build one but I'm not satisfied with the capacitors. What kind of Panasonic cap did you exactly use in yours?
Also my pedal has too much gain, it's unusable on stage, is it a capacitor matter?
thank you very much