- Build Rating
This is my second Red Herring build; here is my first: Red Herring (Menatone Red Snapper).
When I built the first Red Snapper, I liked it, but didn't put a whole lot of dedicated play time on it. For a while now, my primary drive has been my Aion Heliodor (Boss BD-3), which I still love. But I decided I wanted something a bit less compressed. So I revisited my Red Herring, and decided that was exactly what I wanted!
There were two super minor annoyances with my first build (and this is more a statement about neurotic behavior than actual faults with the pedal): one, I built it in a 1590B enclosure, which is great for saving space on a pedalboard, but it puts the input/output jacks so close together that I can't use pancake-style patch cables; and two, I found the volume knob to be a bit touchy - unity gain seemed to be around 9:00, with pretty substantial changes in volume despite very minor volume knob adjustment.
So the first was trivially remedied: I simply used a 125B this time around. The second turned out to be trivial as well: the Red Herring BOM calls for a B250k (linear) taper volume pot. I used an A250k (logarithmic) pot for the second build.
The only other deviation I made from the BOM was to use a 4580 opamp instead of a 4558. I played my original and the new one side-by-side, and couldn't really hear a difference. Edit: looking at the pics I posted, looks like I actually used a 4558! I meant to use a 4580!
My original build used one of my custom microcontroller-based relay bypass boards. At the time I built that, I hadn't yet developed any surface-mount bypass boards, so I had to cram a too-big bypass PCB into what little space was left in the 1590B. I now have some custom SMD bypass boards, which are much smaller, so I put one of those in the original build, and re-used the bypass PCB from the first in the new build.
Everything worked great on first power-on! I liked the way the first one looked, so I didn't change anything in terms of cosmetics. Enclosure is a Tayda sand-texture red 125B, with a Sunnyscopa no-film waterslide decal.
IMO, this is a great-sounding circuit. It's fairly transparent (not quite Timmy-level transparent), but the tone can be tweaked considerably with the "bite" and "cut" knobs. To my ears, they are somewhat interactive, and should make it possible to dial-in a workable tone with just about any guitar or amp. It's also a super simple build, with very low parts count (and all the parts are pretty standard/common values). I'll bet most of the veterans on this forum have the parts in their inventory to build this.
I mentioned this in the build report for Red Herring #1, but it's worth repeating: this pedal pairs extremely well with the Mojito Deluxe! I've got both on my board right now. If I continue to like this pair as much as I do now, I might just have to put them together in a single enclosure.
When I built the first Red Snapper, I liked it, but didn't put a whole lot of dedicated play time on it. For a while now, my primary drive has been my Aion Heliodor (Boss BD-3), which I still love. But I decided I wanted something a bit less compressed. So I revisited my Red Herring, and decided that was exactly what I wanted!
There were two super minor annoyances with my first build (and this is more a statement about neurotic behavior than actual faults with the pedal): one, I built it in a 1590B enclosure, which is great for saving space on a pedalboard, but it puts the input/output jacks so close together that I can't use pancake-style patch cables; and two, I found the volume knob to be a bit touchy - unity gain seemed to be around 9:00, with pretty substantial changes in volume despite very minor volume knob adjustment.
So the first was trivially remedied: I simply used a 125B this time around. The second turned out to be trivial as well: the Red Herring BOM calls for a B250k (linear) taper volume pot. I used an A250k (logarithmic) pot for the second build.
The only other deviation I made from the BOM was to use a 4580 opamp instead of a 4558. I played my original and the new one side-by-side, and couldn't really hear a difference. Edit: looking at the pics I posted, looks like I actually used a 4558! I meant to use a 4580!
My original build used one of my custom microcontroller-based relay bypass boards. At the time I built that, I hadn't yet developed any surface-mount bypass boards, so I had to cram a too-big bypass PCB into what little space was left in the 1590B. I now have some custom SMD bypass boards, which are much smaller, so I put one of those in the original build, and re-used the bypass PCB from the first in the new build.
Everything worked great on first power-on! I liked the way the first one looked, so I didn't change anything in terms of cosmetics. Enclosure is a Tayda sand-texture red 125B, with a Sunnyscopa no-film waterslide decal.
IMO, this is a great-sounding circuit. It's fairly transparent (not quite Timmy-level transparent), but the tone can be tweaked considerably with the "bite" and "cut" knobs. To my ears, they are somewhat interactive, and should make it possible to dial-in a workable tone with just about any guitar or amp. It's also a super simple build, with very low parts count (and all the parts are pretty standard/common values). I'll bet most of the veterans on this forum have the parts in their inventory to build this.
I mentioned this in the build report for Red Herring #1, but it's worth repeating: this pedal pairs extremely well with the Mojito Deluxe! I've got both on my board right now. If I continue to like this pair as much as I do now, I might just have to put them together in a single enclosure.
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