Repeating Myself: Delay Pedal Build

One thing I said earlier this year, perhaps a few times, was that I wanted to step away from drive pedal builds and work on more things like reverb, delay and other styles of effects. While I have worked on other effects: two reverbs, two compressors, one tremolo, a few LM386 based power amps, an envelope filter and two inductorless Wahs, I somehow totally forgot to add a delay pedal to my list of builds for the year. My Disaster Transport Jr. clone has a bit of background noise that I need to address, but I love it. My super cheap ($8) Mugig Echooos delay pedal has been really awesome too, but something echoed (get it!?) in my head that I still need another delay pedal. Maybe more, but for now at least one more.

I still have a ton of resistors, transistors and capacitors, but potentiometers are starting to dry up, especially now that I can't put together quick orders from Tayda Electronics. I love you Tayda, but $20 shipping for $5 worth of parts just doesn't make sense. I know it's not your fault, I forgive you, I just hope one day soon I can order from you again. All that being said I need to check my potentiometer stock before I add anything to the build list, most of which gets kicked off due to the lack of one singular potentiometer. Oh, I know I can adjust the value of a potentiometer, but I prefer not to, because it doesn't always yield the correct results. This paragraph was a long way around in saying potentiometers are limiting my options for delay circuit builds.

Then it happened! I saw the layout for the Wampler Faux Analog Echo, and it was glorious! There was a problem though. I didn't have the 50k linear pots for the delay and level. Sooooooooo, I used 100k instead! What happened? It seems I might have a bit more delay time, and the level seems to get a bit cripsy on the very top end, so just don't crank the level all the way and that won't be an issue. Once it was built I tried to adjust the settings to the ones suggested in the manual for the real pedal and I wasn't far off. All the things the original pedal can do are in here, it just takes a little adjusting to find them. No problem.

With the Faux Analog Echo finished that makes my sixty-third completed build, twenty-ninth of the year and that leaves four projects left to build. I'm not saying I won't add more, it's just that's all I've got currently. Sadly I've procrastinated on some builds because they seem complex and I'm not wanting to screw them up, so I figured I better screw them up last, you know? Hopefully that's not the case, but trust me, you'll know if I do. Or will you? Maybe, maybe not. Let's just all agree that the remaining builds will go well, and everything will be fine by the end of the build year. That's the spirit!