Shoot the Moon ... in a 1590A

[midwayfair]

mwa ha haha haaaa!

CultureJam's Shoot the Moon (based on the Tremulus Lune) in a 1590A.

Since the boards from the group buy are gone at this point, I'd be happy to share my 1590A perfboard layout. Just PM or e-mail me if you want it. My final layout was a little different than what you see here (this board ended up with two jumpers, the final only has one), but obviously it's verified. You'll need some 1/8 watt resistors in common values (there's still one standing up resistor -- I did my best!). But we've all purchased our 1/8 watts for the baby builds, right?



Green LED and the knobs and moons on the side glow in the dark. I also did a much better job getting the "crackle" texture effect in the paint (I just used some acetone where I wanted it to crack and then put the clear on almost immediately -- it looks much more natural than trying to do it with wet paint on top of slightly-dry paint).

The Depth and Wave knobs are almost touching -- I can't seem to get the baby build guide to print without page scaling, so there's still some fudging with where I make my drilling marks. Otherwise the knobs would have been a little more comfortably spaced like on my recent Zen Drive build. Four 9mm pots are actually not that difficult to fit now that I've done it a couple times. Fortunately, those are the two knobs I'm least likely to touch on the fly.

I did make two small changes to the original circuit -- I made the gain knob 5K instead of 10K. My previous build was a little touchy at the CCW end of the gain, and I don't usually set my trems much above unity, so I just picked a pot that hit unity a little later in the pot's travel. I also changed some stuff pertaining to the rate LED so that I only had one extra wire coming off the board instead of two. That doesn't affect anything soundwise, though.

[nzCdog]

Oh yeah! That vero rules, pretty small footprint! Nice work Jon

[jtn191]

beautiful, man!

[pickdropper]

Very nice shrinking this one down.

I love the sound of this trem.  I plan to box up mine up soon.

[gtr2]

Nice work John!

Josh

[midwayfair]

Thanks, folks. Pickdropper: really looking forward to seeing your build. Everything you build is always  .

[GrindCustoms]

Très Cool!

Love that trem!

[culturejam]

 

[pickdropper]

Thanks, folks. Pickdropper: really looking forward to seeing your build. Everything you build is always  .

Thanks John, that's very flattering.

Unfortunately, it won't be in a 1590A.  It will be a fabbed board swimming in a 125B, which is what I use on most builds these days (I prefer top-mount jacks if possible).

I hope to get to it this week.  Too many other things in the way lately.

[mshuptar]

Really cool looking! I haven't build a trem pedal yet; can this pedal do a "hard-chop" effect (almost like a helicopter)?

[midwayfair]

Really cool looking! I haven't build a trem pedal yet; can this pedal do a "hard-chop" effect (almost like a helicopter)?

Yes, it will go from "almost sine wave" to "almost completely square".

The following DIY projects will also do the really hard chop helicopter effect:
Stutter Trem (one of CultureJam's projects) -- simply the squarest wave you can get. I've got two!
Vox Percussion
Quadrovibe (Haberdasher sells an etch for it)
Tremulus Lune
Music PCB tap tempo trem
There's a project on DIYstompboxes that uses a 555 timer IC to shunt the signal to produce a square wave trem. I forget what it's called, though.

I have a thread on The Gear Page about tremolos that can stutter, too. There's some good info there.

You can also make a transistor-based trem like the EA tremolo more extreme by using higher gain transistors in the input stage. This lets you turn down the trimpot and the troughs will get really quiet, while the peaks are boosted a lot. I tested an MPSA18 and it was a really, really deep sine wave. You might find that a really deep sine wave gives you what you want -- it will sound a little more like a pulse than an on-off effect.

[bigmufffuzzwizz]

Great job as always! I just dug up my STM trem, think I gotta get this one going and boxed. Did you build a double flush? That was the tremolo I was craving before and I wonder how they compare..

[midwayfair]

Great job as always! I just dug up my STM trem, think I gotta get this one going and boxed. Did you build a double flush? That was the tremolo I was craving before and I wonder how they compare..

I have not built the Double Flush ... yet. Given my apparent desire to build ever tremolo ever designed (and some two or three times ... twitchtwitch), it'll probably happen eventually. :/

[pickdropper]

Great job as always! I just dug up my STM trem, think I gotta get this one going and boxed. Did you build a double flush? That was the tremolo I was craving before and I wonder how they compare..

I highly recommend giving this one a go.  It sounds great.

[midwayfair]

Been getting a lot of requests for this ... here's the layout.



Yes, this requires some tolerance for having your pot wires all over the place, but has no jumpers!