Here’s a picture of an Ugly Face I made recently. For the graphics on this I used PnP. Not sure how this is going to work out. This is second effect I did with this method. This one came out better than the fist.

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Shocktave Build

This worked right after I found a small solder bridge grounding the input cap. The PCB layout I posted has some very small traces that are very close to the ground plane. I thought this was going to be a nightmare to solder. It was actually not too hard. I found careful application of small amounts of solder worked well.

I had to sub a 2n5089 for a 2n5088. Since I only 4 2n5089s on hand. I picked the Q1 as the substitute.

My first impression was wow this is so distorted I’m not even sure that it’s working. After some testing I notice there is a very nice octave that comes out at times. Seems playing single notes around the 12th fret really brings out the octave, go figure. The octave sounds very nice under the right conditions.

Chords throw everything out the window. Playing a chord seems to make the sound explode into a barrage of noise, and not very musical noise at that.

Could be good for something. The mix is useful. Turning it down you can mix the octave to a pleasing level. Turning the mix all the way up produces a random arpeggiated note sort of distortion. This has some potential, but is hard to control. Q4 and 5 form an oscillator that is driven by the input signal. I wonder if  there were a control control the frequency of the oscillator if some more interesting sounds would come out.

The oscillator portion of the circuit stumps me. I don’t understand how this works and have not been able to find anything similar for reference.

I have been thinking about making Joe Davidson’s Shocktave for many years now. I have yet to build it, the PCB in this post is unverified so far. I’m finally getting around to it.

I had built a BSIAB II while back that had all of the transistors in a row. This made for a fun layout. It also made it convenient to use a single 15 peg milmax header as a socket for all the transistors. This worked out well, so I thought I’d try the same idea here. It works out especially nice since all the transistors are the same and face the same way. Hard to put the wrong one in the wrong place or backwards. Not that I would ever do that.

I’m sorry the values are hard to read to in the layout. I’m a beginner with Eagle. If anyone knows how to arrange the values are part names individually please post a comment and let me know.

This is the classic route to distortion. It seems to be included in many designs. Clipping diodes to ground have many different configurations and choices of diodes. Here’s a great thread talking about clipping diodes to ground.

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=82764.0

Just tested this one again. My mistake the shape pot is working. It seems to me that the Width pot seems to square off the LFO wave form as it is turned up. With Width all the way up the LFO seems to produce more of a square wave.

Here’s an image of the Casualty 4 Phaser. Wired everything up. After figuring out that I had forgotten to connect the ground wire from the jacks to the board everything seems to be working. Initial observations. The Shape pot seems to do nothing. The Width pot seems shape the soft triangle into a trapezoidial square wave. The phase sound is pretty rich. Need to test some more…

Here’s another interesting snippet from the Stompbox Cookbook. I was not able to get this to work. Who knows what went on in the mind of Mr. Boscorelli?

Looks like the guitar signal is meant to modulate the frequency of the 7555 via pin 5. The 7555 then drives the 567, a phase lock loop, which tries to lock on to the signal.

The left half of this scan got cut off. If anyone is interested I’ll post the rest. I think there is just a volume pot.

Here’s a link to some info on the 567:http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/electron/elect12.htm

This will be the fourth time I try to build one of these. I made a PCB for the original using the layout from GGG. I never finished this. Then I built and finished a second using the layout from UStomp.com. I couldn’t get this to work. I forget what the problems were, it was more than a few years ago. Franciso Pena, of Tonepad.com came up with a new and improved version that used 13600 in place of the 3080s. I built the first version of this. It was the most successful of the bunch. It worked pretty well but had two problems that I couldn’t seem to solve. With mine you could hear a ticking from the sample rate oscillator and the sweep switch refused to work in one direction.

Anyway, I found a sheet of PnP that I had printed sometime ago of Francisco’s second version of the FSH-1. I thought what the heck, might as well give it another try.

I’ve run into a few project lately, Casualty 4 and Sunking, that fit in a B sized box, but leave no room for a battery. This has me rethinking the battery as a power source. To be honest I use batteries almost exclusively. I rarely use a power supply. The reason, I don’t own a decent power supply. I have a single 9v wall wart from RS. Which works fine but has a terrible ripple.
I do admit I also throw away a lot of batteries. It would be nice to not be producing the extra waste.
It would also be nice to not have to buy batteries. 9V batteries are fairly expensive. I look around and can find them for about a buck. Though, a few weeks ago I bought two at this dollar store on Divisadero St. and they were both dead when I opened the package!
What do people expect when they buy an effect? Do you expect it to use batteries and a power supply? How do people feel about effects that don’t have the battery option?

Not sure if this is Sunking or Sun King. Either way it’s clone of the Klon Centaur. That apparently fits into a B sized box. Hats off to MadBean for making that happen.
I way have to give this one a try. Here’s a link:
http://www.freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6392&start=40