Two Swedish Chainsaw HM2 pedals, stock vs modded

[Rockhorst]

I made two HM2 pedal with The3SecondRule's Swedish Chainsaw V1 board. It's the 4 knob version that I 'converted' to 5 knob: the low control became the mid control, the level and low pots were wired off board. Sorry for the bad photo quality, there's currently not a lot of light around even during the day. iPad cameras suck at low light conditions.

This white one is 'stock'


This blue version has some mods: soft and hard clippers are LEDs, the germanium diodes were jumpered. I also slightly changed the center frequencies of the tone controls:

• Low 330R became 470R with 1u cap (didn't have 1u5, both white and blue have this)
• Mid 6n8 became 8n2
• High 330R became 390R

Gutshot of the blue one. The white one has tidier guts but I wasn't able to photograph those anymore. I can say that shielded wire on the blue made no difference on noise level though (compared to non shielded on the white).



Finishing them was a bit of a PITA. The boxes were powdercoated by Stevie1556. To achieve the colored lettering I sprayed some regular rattle can on there and covered with black/transparant vinyl sticker. Didn't work out as good as I had hoped, not going to do that again. Especially since the clearcoat reacts with the spray paint, making it run from under the sticker. Hence the bleed on the white/orange and the 'drop shadow' attempt at a cover up on the blue one. Oh well. Originally, I was going to make two white ones. One of the boxes got caught by the drill, which messed up the powder coat. I filled it up with spray and marker and then really found out the clear reacts with the rattle can spray. Here's the result of that clusterf**k:



Soundwise, I don't think the modifications to the tone stack are that radical and not very noticeable. With all the knobs maxed there certainly is a difference in sound between the two units. The white one nails 'that one sound' perfectly, but also feels kinda nasal. The blue one has a bit more clarity and would probably cut through the mix better in a band situation. My guess is that this is mainly due to the bridging of the germanium clippers. It would be worth it to make this a switchable mod IMO. It's funny that the pedals sound identical with all the knobs half way at 12 o' clock though.

Here's a quick sound demo to illustrate, recorded with a Sony Linear PCM recorder. I used a stereo setup with an 18W Blues Breaker on one end of the room and a modded Epiphone Valve Jr. on the other end. The recorder was set up in between. The slight delay effect is from a TC Flashback.

Link to demo
(not able to use SoundCloud at the moment)