Built this pedal today. From the time I opened the box to the time it was fully assembled and tested... 7 hours. I've built 10 BYOC pedals, all of them back around 2010-2012 for the most part.
My favorite of all of them has always been the Phase Royal, which I have loaded with sockets so I could play with all of the caps and resistors. I thought it needed more lower capacity out of the box, so I applied the bass mod at one point, and socketed everything at that time. I run the old Phase Royal at 18V these days, and... well, as I said, it's been my favorite for a long time.
For some perspective... In my pedal chain are the old Phase Royal, the old EHX The Worm, which I modded to accept an expression pedal for range, a Chase Bliss Wombtone (from which I stole the expression pedal for my initial startup of the new Phase Royal, and now the new BYOC Phase Royal Script phaser... in other words, I have some decent comparables and (since I really enjoy a good modulation) they all get used.
So, like the others commenting, the original package had an extra 470kohm resistor, and I admit to being a bit confused by the trimpot situation. I received the resent trimpots, which from the posts above sound like they are all 250k... The set in the original kit (4 trimpots) were all marked '253', and the second set I received appeared to be 2 marked "254" and one marked "25" (though it appeared that the '5' was partially unprinted on this one, so I suppose it's possible that it also should have read "254"). I put the '254's in the 'upper limit' spots and the other in the 'lower limit', and used one of the original '253' trimpots on the module header. And not to jump ahead, but because I always sort the parts first, tape them to the instructions, and label them (part of that 7 hrs...), I found - just by way of commenting on it - that the 1M Resistor looks WAY more like [Brown, Black, Black, Yellow, Brown] than it does [Brown, Black, Black, Orange, Brown]... everything else in the module kit checklist was exactly as written (2N25458 transistors, for the curious).
Next, I had the following electrolytic caps that were not listed on the checklist at all
1 x 220uF 2 x 100uF 8 x 10uF 2 x 15uF
These are clearly laid out in the instruction and printed on the board.
This reminds me... BYOC it would be really helpful if you numbered the pages in these instruction sets. I remember numbering them by hand a few times in the past so I could keep everything in-line...
The kit went together simply and the instructions were good, as usual. The hints for the pots were helpful, and everything time I started to think... "I wonder how..." it was spelled out in the next section. As usual (for me) wiring the footswitch was the most intensive part.
For the Module, it was quick and easy, but there is a comment on Step 4 that says "The capacitor highlighted in yellow is the ceramic disc capacitor" which must be a left over or typo, as there was neither a part highlighted in yellow, nor a ceramic disc capacitor in the kit (and it all went together as instructed otherwise).
I'll be back a little later after I've played a bit on it tonight, but while dialing in the trimpots and giving it a quick test, it's got tons of character, the expression pedal works great (I wonder... what would be required to change the expression pedal from rate to Depth/Regen...). Since I'm used to the old Phase Royal, this one gives so much more to shape the sound and just adds tons of depth the its capabilities. I found that the lower limit trimpot has about a 30 degree arc of effectivity towards the lower end, then it's in the upper limit range - perhaps the '25' trimpot is not correct...
If I had the Input cranked up, there was a little distortion if I also turned the Depth all the way up.
The upper range of the Regen pot has ambient high pitched 'sweep', but this may also be an affect of the input being high - will test this more.
I played through it for about a 1/2 hr and found a variety of settings that I liked. With many pedals I typically find a sweet spot and tend to adjust only with different guitars.
Early summary is, it's got much more depth of character than my old Phase Royal (meaning I have much more control to shape the effect). As I mentioned, I found a variety of great sounds by just adjusting the ratio of the adjustments to each other, and it's not nearly as cumbersome as the Wombtone (which has lot's of options, and a massive variety of tones, but finding them is like programming a POD or something, in my opinion...)
So... Off to put it through it's paces...
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