Tremolo-Matic X

This is Tremolo-Matic X from the Tremolo Issue of Stompboxology by Nicolas Boscorelli. I have redrawn the schematic to make it easier to read. Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone attempting this project. This is Tremolo that pans between a treble and bass signal. It inlcudes controls to set the level for both the bass and treble, rate and depth.

I built mine from the PCB layout posted by Morocotopoat Diystompboxes here. This lay out worked well for me. Though it looks likes it isn’t finished as there are a few extra pads that don’t quite make sense. The layout does work. I have built it myself.

It sounds pretty good. I made a few changes. First I changed the Rate pot to 100K to get a more useable range of speeds. With the original 25K pot the slowest speed was not very slow. I like the sound of slow tremolo. The 100K pot is shown on my vsersion of the schematic. speaking of the rate, I’d like to get a slightly faster rate at the fast speed and a little slower at the slow end. I think I will be playing with R21, R25 and C15 a little more.

The other mod, not included in my schematic, is to decrease the gain on the input stage. Basically this comes down to decreasing the value of R14. With the original value of 470K you get a little bit of clipping with hot pickups. I haven’t decided on a value yet.

Note the, input stage is inverting. Which presents a lower input impedance than would normally be acceptable. But it seems to work OK here.

Also note that there are a few parts list as optional feed through bias or something like that. These parts include a 5V regulator and adjacent parts. I left these out of my build, and everything worked fine. I left these out of the schematic posted here.