JuansoloFX - awesomeness born from failure!

[juansolo]

I wasn't going to post this lot until next week as one of the effects is missing and will be done on Weds. But bugger it, I'll just tack it on the end when it's done.

For those that don't follow Cleggy (Marauder) and my exploits on the juansolofx page on facebook, I'll give a brief history lesson.

Earlier on in the year I had a plan, not a very good one, but a plan none the less. It was to make a few pedals, make them small, strong, and easy to build and sell them as something like a standard line. So if someone said to us, can you build me an Muff for example, we'd say, 'why yes' and be able to knock one together nice and easily and sell it to them. We did about 6 pedals (4x muffs, 1x boost and 1x fuzz), I put none copyright infringing artwork on them, which was basically plain, with a funky font. Priced them sensibly and pimped them to the world... We didn't sell one... In fact I gave one away to a friend instead for doing some You Tube vids with us.

So that didn't work. But it kind of set us on a bit of a mission to actually carry on regardless, and create the fictitious line of unwanted pedals. It became quite addictive. As none of the previous ones sold, I also decided that if I'm keeping the buggers, I'm gonna do the decals my way. So we stripped them all down and we've just finished re-decalling them all (well, bar one, as I mentioned). So here they are. Plus a Maestro phaser at the end, because it got caught up in this batch.


I may as well start at the beginning with the JTB76

A friend of ours brought his 1976 Jumbo Tonebender over for us to have a go with, insisting it was the dogs bollocks. Having built things on this circuit before (it's essentially 3/4 of a muff) we were quite dubious about this claim.

Long story short, we f**king loved it. The girth of a muff, but with that fizz of an older Tonebender. But, being mostly the same topology as a muff, none of the hang-ups of an old fuzz when it comes to playing nice with other things. So we took some photos and cloned it. Then found some transistors that were in the correct ranges and had the right sound then back-to-backed it with the original to make sure it was nailed on. It was. On top of this we found that it was also only two components away from being a B&M Fuzz Unit... It'd be rude not to put them in on a switch now wouldn't it?

We collaborated with Rej on this one and the GCFX Supernature was born (Chuckbuick doing the PCB wrangling on this one). This was the effect that planted the seed of the bad idea





Next it had to be muffs. It's kinda our thing, and  you can get a lot of milage out of a single PCB. As Grind had the uber-featured muff covered with the Ultrastoner PCB, we decided to go the other way and simplify. That way we could build each one to it's strengths without making them over complicated. This is something else we've found from talking to people who gig our pedals; they want the thing to be compact and simple. So that's was part of the philosophy we've tried to stick to. Basically it needs to fit into a Camden Boss enclosure (slightly smaller than a 1590B) and not have too many controls. This has caused Jason (Jubal81), the man who's done all the PCB ninjitsu from this point forth, all kinds of headaches with some of the more complicated effects.

So I'll just rattle these off as you know what you're in for here:

Ultrastoner MkIII
Async Ge clipping for ball-shaking sludgy-dooooom





TSM680 MKIII
An aggressive muff with a mid-focus, bordering on distortion. This one uses LED clipping to maintain that hard edge.





71 Triangle
The remaining two muffs are clones of two of our favourite old muffs. Both with the addition of a mids pot to allow it to work better in a band situation. With the mids all the way counter clockwise, the pedal is stock.

This pedal is a clone of a 1971 Triangle muff, and in my opinion is the most 'muffy' sounding of the lot. At least I suspect it's what people are thinking of when they imagine a muff sound.





DGM3
Last but not least is a Violet Ram's Head clone. After a bit of logic, we suspect this is what David Gilmour's number one muff is based on. It would seem to make sense as it works really well for lead playing and is oddly not as great when it comes to chords.

This one has the most effective mid pot of them all. I usually try and leave a little bit of scoop at the top of the range for the pedal to remain sounding muffy. This one I've set to go pretty much flat.





To round out our initial line we put in a booster. Hey it worked for Zvex! So we thought we'd siliconise our baby boobtube. Which worked spectacularly well. Shockingly so that when you back-to-back this with the toob effect, there's bugger all in it.

Big Omar
Capable of being a clean boost into a amp with lots of headroom, or a OD into one that hasn't as much. It also sounds great after fuzzes to thicken them up.

Big Omar is also a fairly well known British porn star, so probably not an idea to Google that one. It was a play on words, Zvex called his noisy old thing a super hard on, ours has a massive knob and is British. It made sense to us.








Part 2 to follow...

[juansolo]

As I say, doing all that, made us realise we quite liked coming up with these standard pedals and we started thinking about what else we could do. A few were just simple clean ups of Grind effects to make them easier for us to build. Those, and indeed probably most of these effects will probably end up available as PCBs from Rej when we eventually sort all this out as we're all about spreading the love.

We seem to build a lot of trems. A lot is relative you understand, a lot in our world might be two, or maybe even three... Anyhow, I like to build them with all Rej's mods and with 4 pots, because it's awesome. But it's fiddly and annoying to build like that. So we had Jason do his thing, and the STM2 - Bernier Edition was born. Tidy.





Next I just had an urge to make another Demo Tape Fuzz. Mainly because I quite like it. But all that was out there was an etch... We were on a roll at this point, etch?! BAH! Jason, unleash the Eagles and send forth the Gerbils! There was never any plans to sell this one, it's just one we did because we (well I) just felt the need.

DTF
A really interesting and versatile effect. More pre/distortion sounding than fuzz, though at extreme setting fuzz is definitely an option. It has a LOT of volume on tap.





Then we come to something I'd been wanting to do for ages. Indeed it'd existed in schematic form for eons (literally). Its a mash up of my two favourite delays. It's essentially a Grind Customs De Profundis with the current mirroring from Madbean's Zero Point DD to get me two delay ICs. The net result is we get the nice variable filtering (tone) of the Profundis with zero PT2399 noise.

Jason also pulled out all the stops on this one to squish it all onto this PCB. It's the maximum dimensions it can be to fit in our cases (take a look at the gut shot).

Deux Profundis
I'm ecstatically happy with the result of this one, and it has caused us to be way more ambitious with the current effect Jason is pulling his hair out trying to fit onto this sized PCB. That's to come later though, hopefully!






Which brings us to about where we're at right now. We've got the above layout nightmare that I've mentioned in the works and another OD. All of which should be fun.

[juansolo]

The last bits (for now) are just a couple of other pedals that were caught up in the batch. One done in the style of the standard pedals, the other just because I was an idiot.

Tenebrion
We might update the PCB on this as it's a bit of a sod to get into this enclosure neatly. But we'll be leaving the actual circuit well alone as it does what it does rather brilliantly.





StageFright
Madbean's most excellent Stage Fright phaser. I needed to make myself a new one as I foolishly sold my last one in one of the purges. Curses!






As I say there's one more of the standard pedals to add, but that'll be Wednesday, and I've held off posting this lot long enough.

[kaycee]

Lovely work!

I like them all, but I'm a sucker for that Mucha/psychedelia type style. The 71 triangle tickles my fancy the most, I have a B&M clone on pedalboard 2. Also the STM, a PCB of that version would be cool.

Selling stuff seems real slow these days, I don't put much up as most of what I build is for me but its months between sales these days. I dunno if the interest in DIY pedals has waned, or if there are just too many doing it, or the cheapo mini Chinky ripoffs have holed the boat. The fall in the £ should help shifting stuff abroad , but I stopped sending to many Euro countries due to the losses in transist.

But all those look great and have a common style.

[zombie_rock123]

Your artwork choices are fucking awesome, aspirational level guts too man.

[juansolo]

I'm very much into Stoner/psychedelic rock poster art. Malleus being a big favourite of mine. Would love to grab some of their art and get it framed and hung.

[micromegas]

Those finishes look gorgeous Juan.

It is a pity that the standard line run did not work out. With the price and the quality, I thought they would sell pretty quickly.

[m-Kresol]

I'm very much into Stoner/psychedelic rock poster art. Malleus being a big favourite of mine. Would love to grab some of their art and get it framed and hung.

I'm looking at three of them right now. Framed and hung

http://www.malleusdelic.com/site/gallery/gigposters/m/?nggpage=3

I've got the left 3 ones in the middle row. Although the second one is gold instead of red.

[Tremster]

It is a pity that the standard line run did not work out. With the price and the quality, I thought they would sell pretty quickly.

So did I. People don't know what's good for them.
These, as always, look fantastic. Inside and outside.

[juansolo]

I'm very much into Stoner/psychedelic rock poster art. Malleus being a big favourite of mine. Would love to grab some of their art and get it framed and hung.

I'm looking at three of them right now. Framed and hung

http://www.malleusdelic.com/site/gallery/gigposters/m/?nggpage=3

I've got the left 3 ones in the middle row. Although the second one is gold instead of red.

That's awesome! The one I want is this one: https://www.malleusdelic.com/site/wp-content/gallery/art-prints/verdena_0.jpg

love that (yep, I have used it on a pedal...).

[Boba7]

Loved reading it all! They all look so great. The Stage Fright is my favorite I think! Great knobs.

Amazing job.

[juansolo]

It is a pity that the standard line run did not work out. With the price and the quality, I thought they would sell pretty quickly.

So did I. People don't know what's good for them.
These, as always, look fantastic. Inside and outside.

I suspect in the US I'd have more of a chance. The UK market is tough, really tough. I have a lot of respect for people who make it work and don't institutionalise themselves in the process.

As it is, we usually have a slow and steady trickle of effects to a few regulars. It usually keeps the fund in the black, and when that doesn't work we just purge the pedal mountain a bit until it is again. But yeah, it pains me how cheap I have to sell them just to sell them sometimes. Especially when you look at some of the tat people buy from well known brands.

[jubal81]

Absolutely killer what you've done with those. Art on the JTB76 and Tri71 really tickle. Love the 70s aesthetic and I think it's a good way to go - playing to the nostalgia and simplicity of classic analog effects.

[juansolo]

For comparison, this is what the original batch looked like pre-facelift. As I say, a bit plain, but no one was going to get pissed off about the art on them.

[juansolo]

Absolutely killer what you've done with those. Art on the JTB76 and Tri71 really tickle. Love the 70s aesthetic and I think it's a good way to go - playing to the nostalgia and simplicity of classic analog effects.

The 70's vibe was what I was going for with those two particularly.