Build Your Own Clone Message Board

So I recently "finished" building the BYOC envelope filter (the older version: http://www.buildyourownclone.com/oldfilter.pdf) and it isn't quite working properly - its making funny noises, and I don't mean that familiar squelch that we all know and love :p

The first issue is that very rarely I hear a small crackling that I cant reproduce by wiggling stuff about. It doesn't sound like its grounding, its a slightly different crackle...but it happens fairly rarely so I'm not all too concerned.

The second issue is with the "range" pot. When its set so its less than say the 2 o'clock position, it takes all the bottom end out and leaves the signal sounding strange fizzing. All the pots were the same, and of the correct value so I don't think its an issue with them directly. For the rest of the range, the pedal sounds exactly how it should.

Any advice would be much appreciated. There's a picture of the completed board below.

Looks like M1 and L1 are solder starved. Try heating them up and adding some solder and see if that helps.

I'm fairly sure that the old envelope filter is a band pass design, which means it emphasises the frequencies at its centre frequency and cuts both bass and treble. So the problem you have may simply be the way the pedal works. The more recent BYOC envelope filter I have, also a bandpass filter, tends to cut bass too.

The old foot operated classic wah pedals like the Vox have a rather unusual filter characteristic in that they develop a sharper bandpass characteristic at the low end of the sweep and tend to flatten out at the treble toe down end. So when they are opened up at the treble end they tend to be more like a low pass filter and let quite a bit of bass through.

I see what you're saying with it cutting the bass, but there's so much of the sweep that is entirely unusable because its *too* fizzy that thereis definitely a bug somewhere.

Any way, I've fixed up the bad connections, and the same problem still persists. Any ideas?

Could you post a larger photo of the PCB? Need to be able to read all the resistor color bands.

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