Bananafanafophasor (Glasshole with mods)

[Aleph Null]

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.

[Bret608]

I had better luck sourcing 1/6w resistors from Mouser on a recent build, which are the same size as 1/8w in most cases. I figured that out pretty much by accident as I was scratching my head over the lack of 1/8w so just filtered on that 3.4mm length.

Awesome build though! I love the phasor circuit. Yes, it's not something you'd leave on all the time, but it has its place for sure. I like to get the rate a bit faster and play the U2 "Staring at the Sun" riff.

[jimilee]

Woohoo! Phasor the barbarian!!!


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[jessenator]

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?

[Aleph Null]

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.