Tubekløn - Mythical Beast Tube Pedal Kit

Robert

Robert

Reverse Engineer
www.hagamps.com

Hagerman Amplification

Boutique vacuum tube guitar pedals and amplifiers.
www.hagamps.com www.hagamps.com

TUBEKLØN is the world's first tube-based mythical beast overdrive pedal interpretation. After deconstructing the classic design, the minimum gain flat bandwidth feature was removed, instead offering up that sweet midrange boost as the new minimum gain tone. Based on my NEOKLØN architecture, the diode/opamp clipping stage was replaced by a triode, as was the summing stage, which now drives a passive tilt style tone control. The entire circuit is recreated using five transistors, two triodes, and zero opamps. Tonality is same as the original, except at high gain, where you get real tube breakup and sag, instead of opamp clipping.

This kit contains a fully assembled and tested circuit board, tube, and enclosure; you only need to perform final assembly, placing items into enclosure and buttoning up. Keep in mind tube takes about 30 seconds to warm up after power is applied.

PedalPCB is in no way affiliated nor endorsing this product, I just thought it was cool.

With that said, for $249 I feel like it should come fully assembled and ready to rock. Not sure I'm a fan of this new "just tighten the hardware" DIY kit trend... but yeah, I kinda want to try one. :ROFLMAO:


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Visceri said:
I think sushi-box/c2c electronics got the power supply figured out to get the tubes much higher voltages than that, but for 250 bucks this guy better bust out his soldering iron
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yeah man ive got a couple C2CE boards at home.

but this tubeklon thing. just no. i thought builders had grown out of this starved plate triode nonsense thing.

Harry Klippton said:
Those plastic shaft trimmers are HEINOUS
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fucken oath they are
 
Robert said:
Not sure I'm a fan of this new "just tighten the hardware" DIY kit trend.
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Yeah, agreed. For those of us old enough to remember working with plastic model kits, where you cut everything off the sprue, sanded it, glued it together, painted it, etc. – this kind of feels like when that whole industry started shifting to pre-painted snap-together models.

In addition to sucking all the fun out of the activity, at some point you’re just paying for the privilege of reducing someone else’s manufacturing costs by finishing the last little bit of the job for them.

M
 
I fully understand and respect that gods walk among us in the world of DIY pedals.. (There are so many here in this forum!) There’s just a certain smugness about Hagerman that rubs me the wrong way. I don’t know that I could put my finger on any one thing outside of this pedal, but the vibes are off.

😐
 
It makes sense not to put a 200V+ voltage converter in it if you want people to touch it. On the other hand defeats the purpose of having a tube in my option.
It feels a lot like he wants to ride a wave of a Notaklon. When you see order numbers published by JHS you want a piece of that pie... :D

There might be a reason why there is no sound example in his explanation video, just nice-looking bode plots and scope traces. If it sounds good just show it. Nobody cares about plots.
To me it is not building, it is assembling (usually done by manual labour and now subsidized by you).
 
Smrtokvitek said:
It makes sense not to put a 200V+ voltage converter in it if you want people to touch it. On the other hand defeats the purpose of having a tube in my option.
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It makes me want to start taking out 555 timers and creating dc-dc converters... I can almost feel the electrocution risk!
 
Smrtokvitek said:
On the other hand defeats the purpose of having a tube in my option.
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I can both agree and disagree.

On one hand, sticking a tube in a low voltage circuit and pretending you're going to get "authentic amp-like tube tone" is misleading and/or silly.

On the other hand, I don't want to discount a components tonal qualities / differences just because it's not being hammered with +200V.

We use transistors and ICs that aren't exactly cut out for the task all the time, because they do deliver a different flavor.

The LND250 is a high voltage MOSFET, yet it's commonly used in 9V / 18V circuits. The CD4049 was never meant to be used as an audio amplifier, but try telling that to the Red Llama and Tube Sound Fuzz folks. LEDs were meant to emit light, not clip audio signals... but look at them go!

Just because a tube isn't delivering power tube distortion doesn't necessarily mean it's not giving us something different than a transistor or opamp in the same application. Is that "something" good? Well I don't know, but it might be at least somewhat different. Just because it's a vacuum tube doesn't mean we have to expect it to behave like a cranked tube amp.

In the case of this pedal, I'm actually more interested in the surrounding circuit than the tube itself. It doesn't appear to be "just another Klone" with a tube stage tacked on the end. There's not an opamp in the thing, and furthermore, I don't see any "magic" diodes. As a matter of fact, the location of the diodes suggest to me that they're part of the charge pump circuit.... this thing might not even have clipping diodes. That's at least somewhat intriguing.

In any case, the absence (or presence) of a high voltage power supply doesn't convince me that it's a bad (or good) sounding circuit.
There are plenty of shitty sounding real tube amps with lethal voltages, and just as many great sounding low-voltage solid state circuits.

With all that said... it really should come fully assembled. But, like the Notaklön, if it gets more folks into the hobby, so be it.
 
jesuscrisp said:
There's quite leap between tightening some nuts and screws and actual pedal building.
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No doubt, but baby steps. There are some folks who need to start by tightening some nuts and screws. :ROFLMAO:

I've known people who take their guitar to a tech to have the strings changed....

I would imagine there are folks out there who would love (and be great at) the hobby but aren't even aware it's a possibility.
 
Robert said:
No doubt, but baby steps. There are some folks who need to start by tightening some nuts and screws. :ROFLMAO:

I've known people who take their guitar to a tech to have the strings changed....

I would imagine there are folks out there who would love (and be great at) the hobby but aren't even aware it's a possibility.
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Totally this. When I was in high school I would’ve loved to get into electronics but I had no idea where to start. No internet resources and nobody who could help. So it took me at least 10 more years before I soldered my first PCB.
 
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