It's happened! I've reached a DIY guitar pedal building milestone. At the time of this entry's publication I have built 50 total circuits. Now, I have to be pedantic for a moment and specify that I've built more than fifty, but most of those were Bazz Fuss circuits that I used for testing and later dismantled for parts. In the circuits I've actually been keeping a tally on, 49 of those are pedal circuits and one of them is my Noisy Cricket MKII guitar amp. It's not a pedal, but it is a circuit that I've built for the purpose of testing pedal circuits, so it counts. I've also included circuits that still need work done to them to make them viable pedals, simply because they are functional and will eventually become pedals.
Another milestone is surpassing the fourteen builds per year mark. In 2021 and 2022 I built fourteen pedal circuits per year, but on June 3rd I built my fifteen pedal of 2023. I still have eight to ten circuits to build, depending on when parts can be ordered, making 2023 the biggest build year with a potential total of twenty-five builds completed. I do plan to build another LM386 based amp with a preamp modeled after the Soldano SLO-100, so again that will be marked as a build, but they won't be pedals.
Since I last updated this blog with my build progress I've built a bit of an experiment in a Lovepedal Eternity Burst clone using an oddball SIP chip. The circuit sounds killer, but the issue is I used a TA7325P chip from an old radio I tore down, and the mute pin is a bit finicky. Simply grounding the mute pin doesn't seem to work, I need to tap the mute pin every single time to get it to turn the chip on. It really does sound awesome, so I'll just need to keep doing research and experimenting with how to get it to work without needing outside interaction.
I've also built a Zendrive clone that is a bit underwhelming. The tone control does very little to nothing, and nobody seems to know why. It also doesn't seem to have the amount of drive that the original does. It's not a bad circuit, it's just not what I was expecting. So it too needs a little more work. Next up is the Bespeco Weeper Wah clone, and there really isn't much to say about it other than it works. It's an inductorless wah that does exactly what you would expect from it. Sounds good, exceedingly simple build and it could make a nice little compact wah sometime in the future.
Next I built a Prince of Tone clone that is also a bit of an experiment. Because I liked it so much on the Crunchbox clone I built a few months ago, I decided to use the layout that makes the presence control external for this circuit also. While it's pretty useful, I feel it could also just be set with a resistor, so I'm not sure which way I'll go when it comes time to put this in its enclosure. This one has a few hiccups and the output seems to be pretty low, maybe this is in keeping with the Bluesbreaker circuit, I don't know. I still need to work on a few other things for this circuit before it's completed, but it does work and sounds pretty good.
Finally we come to the 50th build, and that is a Mark IV distortion clone. The layout I used is based on the Caline CP-16 Mark 4, which is supposedly based on a Mesa Boogie Mark IV, and regardless of whether this actually sounds like a real Mesa Mark IV, this pedal is fucking awesome! You have two gains and one volume, that's it. With those you blend and mix together whatever level of gain structure you need, and you can dial in almost anything you could ever want. From edge of breakup crunch to all out screaming distortion, and everything in between, this pedal can pretty much do it all. While this was my fiftieth build, it was also my sixteenth build this year, but as I said above I'm still not done.
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