Build Your Own Clone Message Board

I've been wanting to build this pedal for years. Ordered the PCB and a few of the odd components from BYOC last September and finally just got around to building it. The whole thing was a lesson in the price of impatience, but in the end I have a fully functioning pedal, albeit one with:

No clear coat over the decal (d'oh! )
Speaking of the decal, who cut it, and how drunk were they? (Me, and not at all.)
I/O jacks that might as well have been duct taped on (check out the 3PDT washers I used to compensate for the giant drill holes)…
…which compensated for putting the holes in the wrong spot, making it impossible to put the bottom plate on
Oh, and notice I still had to dig deep in my drawer of capacitors to find some electros used in 1590A builds, which I no longer do for obvious reasons, so that the caps closest to the I/O jacks would be shorter, because the lid still wouldn't close.

So yeah, take your time with this stuff, kids. At any rate, it sounds fantastic. Actually, pardon the pun, but not at any rate. Or depth. This thing sings in the subtle range of the controls, but it sounds pretty awful in the extremes. I mention this because it seems like every demo of a modulation pedal jumps immediately to "every control turned all the way up", which frustrates me. This pedal has such a gorgeous sound, but you wouldn't know it from YouTube. I love the chorus mod, too!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me figure it out in the troubleshooting thread.

_________________
Scott

My band, Austin Hollow

You didn't mention the wad of chewing gum you left stuck to the bottom of the PCB!

Seriously, a lot of us have a pedal or two like that one, where the build just seemed to be one damned thing after another!! (HERE is my "masterpiece." )

BTW, love those turquoise knobs!!

_________________
“My favorite programming language is SOLDER” - Bob Pease (RIP)

My Website * My Musical Gear * My DIY Pedals: Pg.1 - Pg.2

Man, that looks awesome. I keep those washers on hand for just that occasion.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

_________________
Pedal building is like the opposite of sex. All the fun stuff happens before you get in the box.

Haha, right, I did forget. That’s actually my favorite non-obvious pedal building tool: sticky tack. AKA Blu-Tack, poster putty, etc. I use it all the time! Great for holding stuff on the PCB when you flip it over to solder, or holding down a wire when you’re soldering to a pot, or preventing smooth stuff from sliding around. You can put a ball of it on the table and press components into it to meter them. The possibilities are endless. Everyone should have some. In this case, it is holding the tack-soldered chorus modification in place until I can get around to a more permanent method.

Wish I could remember where those knobs came from. I only have one left.

_________________
Scott

My band, Austin Hollow

That's a very useful idea! Good tip there, Scott!

_________________
“My favorite programming language is SOLDER” - Bob Pease (RIP)

My Website * My Musical Gear * My DIY Pedals: Pg.1 - Pg.2

If you ever redo the box, you should do the warped vinyl mod. It's like most mods with fx that have an LFO where you change a cap value. Larger cap = slower. Smaller cap = faster. The VB-2 uses a twin-t oscillator to get its perfect sine wave LFO, so it has two caps. C24 and C25 are the caps you want to change. Make both larger to make it slower overall and make both smaller to make it faster overall (you can make it become a ringmod). But the really neat thing about the twin-T oscillator is that C24 controls the even duty cycles and C25 controls the odd duty cycles. So if you make C24 larger and C25 smaller, what happens is you get an uneven rate of pitch bending. The first bend goes up and down quickly and the second bend goes up and down slowly. So it creates a sort of warped vinyl or tape warble effect. I really like it because I like to use the VB-2 as a constant subtle effect that gives it a feel like an old record. Really slow speed with the depth pretty low. It's also neat if you have a delay with an effects loop. It's about as close to a tape echo sim as you can get.

_________________
*patience is a virtue*

Please do not PM me. email is prefered. keith@buildyourownclone.com