A Small Pitfall of Pedal Building and Assorted Bullshit

It's been a month since my last entry, mainly because of uncooperative weather. June 25th we had (another) series of tornados, which isn't as fun as the Discovery Channel makes it out to be. Since then July has been a month of confused and confusing weather. What might start off as a nice day quickly turns into a potential thunderstorm, or vice versa. Needless to say my once a week pedal build schedule was utterly and royally screwed. So I've decided to cram three builds into the final week of July, just to get some July builds done.

The first build of July was a circuit I tacked on to the already massive list of builds, which is a Landgraff Dynamic overdrive clone. I was unfamiliar with it until I came across the layout, so I decided to throw it together. Turns out, it's actually really good. It's a pretty wide range overdrive with a lot of hidden tones inside. The second build, well that was one I was super excited about that turned into a bit of a pile of shit, at least for now.

The second build of July is an Engineer's Thumb compressor. I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus here, but the site this particular layout came from is frustrating because the creator likes components to be soldered in standing up to save board space rather than laying them down like every other layout site. I've used quite a few of their layouts, so I can't complain it's just frustrating to make things fit the way I like them to fit is all.

This second build, aside from being frustrating to construct, has made it dawn on me just how frustrating even a completely accurate build can be assessed once it's complete. With the Landgraff Dynamic overdrive I have plenty of internet videos to refer back to and see if my pedal reacts similarly to the video demonstration. However, something like the Engineer's thumb compressor doesn't have quite as much exposure, so a few things that initially made me think the build was completely wrong, are actually supposed to be that way.

For example, there is a ratio control which acts as a blend for the clean and compressed signal. With the ratio control at 0 I believe it's pure clean signal, and unless the volume output control is nearly maxed the volume is nowhere near unity with the pedal being turned off. Once you begin to add in the compressed signal the volume gradually gets quite a bit louder. I would have never known this, unless I found a singular video demonstration of the circuit where the person in question had to have the volume maxed to be unity with the affect being off.

Now, that's not to say I haven't made any mistakes, because I did. I originally had the input cap one spot too high and there was no sound coming through at all. Once that was fixed I continued troubleshooting, but as I previously said I have no guide on how this pedal should react so I'm going purely on what I expect from the pedal, which only makes troubleshooting more frustrating than needed. This is no one's fault, it's just a collective lack of knowledge on any given circuit and its characteristics makes troubleshooting more work.

All that said I'm still not sure this Engineer's Thumb build is living its full potential, but I've seen enough confirmations that this layout works, so I take full responsibility for it not working correctly, if it doesn't. For now I'm going to be putting it into the pile of circuits that need to be looked over and maybe even completely rebuilt, and move on to the third and final build of the month, which if weather cooperates will be put together on one of the final days of July. Then August's builds will start!

The Time Washburn Told Me the A20 Never Existed

I remember it like it was Autumn of 2001, because it was. I just moved to Michigan and started frequenting the local instrument and pawn stores looking for guitars. One place by the name of National Pawn Brokers Outlet of Waterford was where I spent most of my money. On October 4th, I went in and saw a Krylon granite green explorer style guitar and just had to give it a test. The gentleman working there was a small older guy named Gunther. He was extremely kind, soft spoken, and seemed to take a deep interested in my hobby of playing guitar. Seriously, great salesmanship! After a visual and audible inspection of the guitar I decided to put it on layaway and make payments. At the counter, while the business was transacting, I was told they did have a case that came with the guitar. This turned out to be a lie, but that's neither here not there this many years later.

The actual sales stub from Rosetta's purchase.

If you want to know more about Rosetta you can read this article, so that I don't have to repeat myself too much. Needless to say I was bummed when I paid her off and they told me there was no case, but I still owned the guitar and that's all that mattered. A Washburn A20 for $150 today would be a steal, back then it was just a good deal. What came into my possession as a single humbucker, green granite explorer style guitar quickly transformed into a project I've still yet to finish, much to my dismay. I was, and still am, so disheartened that this guitar isn't playable that I keep her in a homemade coffin in my closet. Which is where she was in 2005, when I decided to go directly to the best source, Washburn themselves, and ask questions about this guitar. HA! Yeah, right!

Even though the internet and email had been a thing for quite some years in 2005, the 1-800 number was still a much better way to contact a business back then. I know, actually having to call and talk to a person scares the shit out of me too, so you can already begin to understand my trepidation. After dealing with Washburn's phone menu system I finally found myself talking to someone who was to represent the company. I told the person I had a Washburn A20, and asked if they could date the guitar by the serial number. Immediately my question was met with confusion. The person eventually seemed to catch up with the conversation and asked for the first few digits of the serial number and explained my guitar was "most likely" a 1980 guitar, but they didn't recognize the A20 style. I explained that it was an explorer style guitar and that Howard Leese used one. Sadly I totally forgot Carlos Cavazo (SORRY CARLOS!) used a black one with red binding.

The Washburn representative was still stumped and had no clue what I was talking about. Their  response to my previous information was an immediate denial that Washburn ever made an explorer style guitar, and the A20 never existed. Knowing Washburn makes both acoustic and electric guitars I thought explaining that it was an electric would help. Nope. They've never made an explorer style electric guitar and the A series did not exist - ever. I said well it was called the Stage Series. Nope. Those never existed either. I suggested they had to have some information on these guitars, which was met with the person telling me all of their records were lost in a flash flood. The longer I sat on the phone with this person the more I felt like I was secretly being recorded for a prank show, so I reluctantly accepted their denial that such a guitar line ever existed and politely let them get back to whatever else they did in the office - perhaps it was the cleaning lady answering the phone for a laugh.

Guess what happened next? In 2006 Washburn reissued the A20. I'm not sure they reissued the whole Stage Series but I know there were very nice looking brand new A20s on the market. I was so fucking mad when I saw the reissues in 2006, having been told a year prior that this guitar never existed and in not so many words either the guitar is fake or a figment of my imagination. I've since found out they were also reissued in 1996, which makes even less sense that the person on the phone would fight me Dokken style, you know, Tooth and Nail, about a guitar they should have plenty of information about while sitting at a desk in a Washburn office. Oops, guess I forgot about that flash flood. Since I own an original I never saw any reason to throw the money at one of the 06 reissues, but I really wish I had now! It's funny how in a matter of a year, give or take a few months, as far as Washburn was concerned the A20 didn't exist, and then it was miraculously reissued.

Kalamazoo Model 1 Appreciation

In May of 2013 Kali came into my life. I remember it like it was ten years ago, which it was. I was standing in a line of people at my favorite Goodwill outlet store visually surveying the blue bins that were being pushed into the room. What caught my eye was what looked like a 1970s practice amp, which turned out to be a late 60's Kalamazoo Model 1, I've dubbed Kali. It was among the last bins being pushed into the room, and I was on the opposite side of the aisle, so I wouldn't be able to snatch her up and run off with her as I had hoped.

No, what appeared to be a pair of brothers put her in their cart and continued on their hunt throughout the outlet store. I was mildly disappointed, but I had to buck up and continue on my own hunt. Later on I passed a clothes bin that had the amp laying face up within it. I thought to myself this was a good bit of luck and decided to give her a closer visual inspection. The speaker cone looked fine, and there were tubes! Sadly the power cable looked like it was in horrible shape, so I knew it was going to need a little work. As I often did I would take larger items up to the registers and weighed them before I committed to the purchase. I can't remember what she weighed, or what the price per pound was back then, but I did go back and read an entry from May 2013 in which I said I paid $8 for the amp and some other things that day. So, for sake of brevity we'll say I paid $8 for Kali.

It was about six years later, in 2019, that I finally decided to take the risk and remove the "death capacitor", change out the power cable and replace the filter capacitor(s). I'm not a professional, but I have to say I must have done an ok job because that brought this little amp back to life. After hearing what this little amp sounds like I wish I had done this work many years earlier, but at least I had it completed before I started building guitar pedals. You see, I'm not sure whether it was having Kali in working order that inspired me to build pedals, or whether the joy of playing new pedals through Kali urged me to start/continue building guitar pedals. Either way, Kali is the reason I build pedals.

I often wonder who, and even what was played through Kali before she came into my possession. I'm not going to wake up tomorrow to an email from someone famous saying "Oh! That was my first amp, and I want it back! Just name a price!", but with the amp being made in the late 1960s we can surely say someone had a damn good time with this little amplifier. Maybe someone was a fan of The Rolling Stones? Maybe Albert King? Lynyrd Skynyrd? What type of guitar did they use? Was a Kalamazoo guitar plugged into her? Some, now, vintage and highly sought after Fender or Gibson guitars maybe? Was Kali ever on the stage at someone high school band recital? Maybe a band at prom? Who knows, but it's a part of her history therefore it's something I wish I knew.

I would also like to know what year she was built. She has a Model 2 chassis, because there is a hole covered by the woody faceplate for the tremolo control for the Model 2. Beyond that, I couldn't tell you anything else that might give us a date. In the scope of things it doesn't really matter, because she exists and she has a lovely voice. She can be super clean, sparkly and even glassy depending on the pickups, all the way to screaming, heavy overdrive. While I use my little DIY guitar amp for initial pedal circuit testing, Kali is the final word on whether a pedal circuit is up to my standards or not, because she is always extremely honest on how the pedal speaks through her. Even though she's a tiny little practice amp, what more could a bedroom rockstar ask for?

DIY Pedal Building Milestone

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.

The Guitar That Got Away

Throughout the twenty-seven years I've played guitar I've had to let a few of them slip away for a variety of reasons. I owned a B.C. Rich Warlock that I just didn't completely connect with and sold to a friend. I also owned an Ibanez GIO GAX70 that I actually liked quite a bit, but I sold to another friend looking to get into playing guitar. I owned a Jasmine S-34C, which was my very first acoustic, but I didn't connect with it, so I returned it. A bit of a TMI overshare on that guitar is that within the first week of owning it I was trying so hard to connect with it that I actually took it to the bathroom with me to play while I did a numero dos. Nothing foul happened, it just sat on my lap as I strummed and did my business. I want to publicly apologize to whomever got that guitar after me. I'm sure the retailer sold it as a used item.

But above all there is one guitar that I still think about to this day. In about 2008 or 09 I was looking to get into seven string guitars. A big box retail chain had a good deal on an LTD SC207 and I snatched it up from their online sales page, as I had done with many other guitar related items previous and never had an issue. When the guitar arrived I was elated. It was comfortable, the neck felt amazing and the guitar sounded really good for an entry level seven string guitar. The problem reared its ugly head when I settled down and started focusing deeper than my initial excitement. It was the dreaded fret buzz. Oh sure, the truss rod could be adjusted, the string height could be adjusted, a lot of things could be adjusted, but what couldn't be adjusted was the now noticeable twist in the neck.

I took the guitar to the local big box chain store from where I purchased it, and their guitar tech told me it was beyond repair. The best they could do was refund me my money, so I reluctantly accepted and left the store without looking at any other seven string guitars they had in stock. I was so excited to finally have a seven string guitar, and it met all my expectations with flying fucking carpets, but that neck just could not be unfuckulated. I was heartbroken. Again, this was an entry level guitar that completely blew me away, so I doubt even if I had looked that any of those guitars would have healed my heartache in that moment.

I've played low-end and mid-range LTD guitars, and even a few high-end ESPs, so the brand has my respect from top to bottom. For a while I lusted after a red LTD H 207, but the SC207 really had me wanting another one of those. More recently I've thought about buying one of the highly unfortunately named MH-17s. I'm just a bedroom rockstar so all I need is something to make noise with, and I think something like the MH-17 would do me just fine, but I know I will always want another SC207.

The saddest end to the story is, just like my returned Jasmine S-34C, that SC207 was put back up on their used sales website for double what I purchased it for days after I returned it. Did they lie and fix the neck? Did they not give a shit and just put it back up for sale? Who knows, but I can say Guitar Center is a shitty company, and that's probably why they knowingly sold me a guitar with a twisted neck, and some other poor sap who unknowingly bought it online after me.

Don't Know What You've Got, Until It's Gone.

I could drone on and on about things from my past I've lost that now I wish I had back, but one is a bit more widespread than just to myself. Today's topic kind of pertains to video rental stores. Now, I was never a Blockbuster member, nor did I rent there. The closest I came to Blockbuster was the bassist in my high school band worked there, and I went in a handful of times looking for used video games. My childhood bestfriend's Mom may have rented us video games from there on one of my many, many stayovers at his house on the weekends, but beyond that I didn't grow up a Blockbuster patron.

We had a local chain that had four stores throughout their existence that offered it all, and was pretty quick to add new stock. The chain in question was Movieland USA, with their main building in Mooresville Indiana. I remember going in and seeing video games before I saw any of the movies, the latter of which I really had no interest in anyway. My childhood bestfriend's Mom would rent us a video game or two for the weekend and we would make the best out of it from two days. Later on I purchased a few video games they were selling to clear out old stock. I believe they were $5 each or three for $12, and of course I always bought three NES games at a time. All of them came with their original boxes and manuals, albeit with a sticker stain, but they were all in good shape. I purchased a CIB Wayne's World for the NES from there, which I stupidly sold to FukyuLand, I mean FuncoLand, many years later, but I've already told that story.

 Years passed by, I moved out of state and on the odd visit I would sometimes drive by the old Movieland building, which was a historical building on main street in downtown. Movieland must have started feeling the strain of more competition such as RedBox and Netflix, before they were a streaming service, and moved into the basement of the same building, and closed all their other store. They stuck it out and stayed in business until about 2018 and finally called it quits, closing up shop for good. If you want to read the full story you can find it here.

Since then the owner has passed on and the former building in Mooresville was destroyed by a tornado on the 8th of April 2020. There's absolutely no going back, even for a quick nostalgic trip, the heart and soul of the owner, and the physical location of the building are both gone. I'm not sure if I still have any of the NES games I purchased from them all those years ago, but I believe I might have some of their SNES games. It's hard to tell as they're in the boxes, with Xeroxed manuals and only the circular sticker stains would be a sign of having been their rentals, but I can only guess whether or not that's from Movieland USA. So amongst the many things I've lost in my life, it may seem silly, but one little rental store in a small rural Indiana town still calls to me from the past, yet there is no way for me to answer that call.

Never Meet Your Heroes

There is an old saying that goes something like never meet your heroes, you'll only be disappointed. I've found this also applies to components for building guitar pedals. Way back in 2021 I built my ROG Umble that required J201 JFETs, which was a whole new experience for me in more ways than one. Up to that point I had shied away from building circuits that required JFETs solely because they were all obsolete and out of stock, rendering many circuits I wanted to build useless endeavors. Eventually I did manage to find SMD J201s and horribly soldered up my own conversation boards to make them through-hole. Luckily the Umble circuit has biasing trimpots, because my homemade versions needed quite a bit of dialing in. Even though I made my own and the pedal sounds pretty good, after getting it dialed in. I do still wondered what it would sound like with real, true J201s.

I dreamed of the day when I might actually be able to touch a real J201, like so many other pedal builders before me. I wouldn't take for granted that I was part of the club, while so many may never have that chance to do so. Well, that was how I felt before I managed to purchase some real J201s. I mean, they're J201s. When I received them I put them into the Umble circuit and it sounded the same, meaning my slapdash homemade J201s were no worse than the authentic through-hole component I had always dreamt about.

I'm not saying they're bad, it's just that I built up this wonderful world in my head based on a component being unobtainium and not on the reality that it's just a J201. With my delusional head I thought that the authentic through-holes would have yielded far better results than the little things I soldered up so poorly. The differences, if any, were imperceptible. I guess it's my fault for thinking they would be any different, or perhaps having little faith in my homemade J201s being any good. What I've learned is components are components and they'll generally do what you expect from them, no matter if they're hard to find or the easier to find equivalent.

DIY Sound Probe

When it comes to pedal circuits that give me grief, usually standard troubleshooting, solder bridge finding and "oops, I'm an idiot" admitting will suffice. In the case of my Blues Driver and Kay tremolo clone circuits these methods just aren't good enough, apparently. Both circuits function well, but have their own mysterious issues that ruin the functionality of the circuit entirely. This is why I decided I needed to construct myself a sound probe and see if that could get me anywhere closer to figuring out the problems.

A sound probe is simple enough to build. You take a length of double wire and on one end you solder on a clip for your ground, and a probe attached to the other wire. On the other end you connect the ground and probe wires to a male audio jack of your choosing, using a 100nf capacitor on the probe end, and you're good to go. I chose 6.35mm so I could plug into my mini amp. I've had some really thick car audio wire hanging around for a while, so I took about a foot of that and slapped my audio probe together. Quick and dirty, but it works.

To use the audio probe I plug it into my mini amplifier, attach the clamp to the (hopefully) grounded enclosure of the circuit and start probing along the circuit board to find the signal path. Don't forget to inject a signal into the pedal circuit first, or there will be nothing to hear. To do this I chose to play music from my cellphone and used a 3.5mm to 6.35mm adapter to connect a guitar cable between the input jack of the circuit and output of my cellphone. This all worked pretty well.

Despite having one more tool in my arsenal to help troubleshoot circuit gremlins, I'm still no closer to figuring out what's wrong with the Blues Driver clone. However, it took me posting on reddit to find out the tremolo circuit was bad from the beginning. I could go on and on about how so called verified layouts can still yield absolute worthless results, but the counter to that usually ends up being that I need to be Nicola Tesla to even touch a circuit. Reddit is a weird fucking place. Once the volume issue on the tremolo was corrected I still need to figure out why it distorts. But that's for another day.

Ugly but functional!

Knocking Down the To Do List

I have a Windows notepad documenting all my effects pedal builds since day one. I put the name of the circuit built, the date it was built and alongside them I put anything that needs to be checked, fixed, adjusted, troubleshot, etc. I also add an asterisk for pedals that still need an enclosure. Some of my pedals, including the LPB-1 clone, which was my second build, still to this day needed attention. So, I decided I would start knocking things off the list of repairs and adjustments that I needed to do.

The LPB-1 clone used an old A100k pot that worked just fine, until I closed up the build and let it sit. Afterwards, every time an ant would sneeze within a 500km radius when the pedal was on it would crackle. So I decided it was time to clean the pot, so I cleaned it with rubbing alcohol. That fixed it, for now. Should any issues arise from having used rubbing alcohol I'll just replace the pot entirely.

Next I moved on to my 8-bit fuzz, which is a Shoe Pixel clone, and that too needed a pot cleaning. After doing so I managed to clean up 90% of the pot, but it's still crusty and crackly on the furthest top range. That's good enough for now, but this pot will most likely be replaced in the future, should it become more problematic.

Finally I decided to tackle the oscillation of my Rat clone, Rata Blanca. This pedal had been nothing but trouble since I built it, back in March of 2022. I socketed the op-amp to test what sounded best, and also to put in a LM308, should I find one for less than the price of a whole Klon Centaur. For now it's an OP07 Rat and it sounds ok, it just loves to squeal though. I thought I had tested everything and it really was driving me insane, so I packed it away for a few months. When I hooked it up to fix it the oscillation was gone, except in bypass, furthering my feeling of being driven insane. So I decided to tackle the issue of the bypass oscillation by grounding the footswitch and attaching the input to ground when bypassed. This cured the bypass oscillation, but then I noticed the oscillation was back when the pedal was turned on, but it went away if I touched the enclosure. Simple! Ground the enclosure! So I did, and that cured that. Rata Blanca is now finished.

I still have some things to figure out and fix, but I've knocked all the 2020 and 2021 builds off my repairs list. I only have four repairs necessary for my 2022 list, considering I built fourteen pedals last year that's not too bad. The biggest problematic circuits still remain the Blues Driver clone and this year's tremolo circuit, the latter of which actually scored bit of success. It was confirmed the layout I used had an error in it that I'm just not smart enough to have recognized, and the volume issue was rectified in full. However, now the tremolo is an overdrive tremolo. I'll keep plowing through and see what fixes it though.

The Yay and Meh of the Last Few Weeks.

Since we last spoke I've added three more builds to the completed bag. The completed bag is one of Tayda's huge pink bags where I keep the completed circuits in smaller bags, while they await their enclosures. Each circuit's enclosure has already been picked out, it's just a matter of purchasing them. I also have a bag of knobs already setup for each circuit once those enclosures are purchased, drilled and ready to become each circuit's new permanent home. The three newest completed builds are a Box of Hall reverb, an EQD Chrysalis clone, and a JHS/EHX Lizard Queen clone. I'm still working on the tremolo circuit though. It will be done sometime -- sometime!

The Box of Hall comes with the Heaven Within mods and feedback control. This one still requires the Belton reverb module, but I figured I should build at least one of the two reverbs on this years list so that I have something to test the Belton modules in when I get them. I really enjoyed the Rub-a-dub reverb I built last year, even though the reverb is a bit ripply. I feel the more reverb choices I have the better, and they can always be stacked to see how good that might sound. The other reverb I plan to build this year is an EQD Ghost Echo clone.

Speaking of EQD, the EQD Chrysalis is fucking awesome! I listened to a few demos and it sounds like a 1970s op-amp overdrive, but it's actually a very low component count overdrive that uses two transistors to get its sound. Even through my Kalamazoo Model 1 this pedal sounds amazing. It sounded good through my little test amp rig, but once it hit real tubes the pedal, and the amp, came alive. I'm shocked at how good it sounds, when I'm so much more familiar with transistors producing a fuzz style effect.

Speaking of fuzz style effects, I built a Lizard Queen clone. I hate it. I've made it well known that I'm not a big fan of fuzz, and I'm actually even less a fan of octave. Every octave I've heard sounds like someone farting in an attempt to cover up the original note, and failing completely as you can still hear the original note. Now, 50% of the two people who read this blog will be asking their screens "Why did you build it if you weren't going to like it?", and to that I would say, because I could. Every component for each of this year's builds were bagged up, tagged and sorted many, many months before I even got started. With the Lizard Queen being such a new product, I decided to use one of the many layouts and try my hand at it. Is it a waste of components? Nope. I'll just put it in an enclosure and let it be what it is.

As of the posting of this entry I have completed eleven builds this year, putting me three builds away from each of the past two years total builds, and bringing my overall total up to forty-five. There have been a lot of things learned, and I still have a lot of things to learn, but it's still a fun process. Aside from the tremolo, a Boss Blues Driver clone from last year is also being a bit of a pain in the ass. I've gone over it a few times and it's still not putting out much volume, kind of like the tremolo circuit. I felt this might be the right time for me to build a sound probe, so I can probe around and see where the volume drops. That should help diagnose and troubleshoot some issues. No, I don't consider the sound probe one of this years builds, as it's a utility TO build pedals. Hopefully this helps get a few things sorted and I can put these two pains into the completed builds bag!