The Plimsoul Clone

The builds of 2024 continue and the Plimsoul is the latest to be completed. Essentially, in the off season, I was searching for any circuit that could even loosely be associated to the word "blues". I've become more of a blues player as I've gotten older, and lets face it, since my body and fingers don't work the way they used to. I do find blues connects with me though, and I greatly enjoy playing blues guitar, so I figured I wanted as many guitar pedals as possible to give me multiple options for blues tones. One circuit that had been on my radar for a while was indeed the Plimsoul, but I felt it was a bit more distortion than bluesy, but tagboard effects description has the word bluesy in it twice, so that's all it took to convince me it was worth a try.

As far as the build, well, it was going fine until I remembered that it was suggested in the comments of the layout to substitute one of the three A100k pots for an A10k. I decided to go with a C10k as it was the only 10k I had on hand, which works just fine. Luckily it was an easy situation to rectify, once I found out which pot it was. It's the sustain pot by the way. I was a bit anxious about wiring the dual pot for stage two control, because I'm always anxious about wiring dual pots, but that turned out just fine. Once it was all soldered up it was time to test it.

At first the circuit didn't work properly. All I got was a stuttering sound when I played the notes on my guitar. My first tactic is always knifing the gaps, so I took my xacto knife and slit between the rows and tested it again. That did the trick, and the circuit came to life. After testing it a little bit more this circuit did surprised me as it's one that offers quite a bit of flexibility. Is it bluesy? It can be. It can also be a boost, or an overdrive all the way to a distortion. I enjoyed this circuit more than I thought I would, even though I've not really played around with it too much. I pretty much tested how much drive it offers, then engaged stage 2 and left it full tilt as a distortion. Now that the Plimsoul is done what the next build will be is up in the air, but whatever it is will be the 90th build.