Shallow Water / Low Tide Modulator build..

[grobbins]

Build Rating

5.00 star(s)

This was not my favourite pedal to build.

Here is why:
1. It cost me a fortune to build. And then my friend decided he wanted wanted one tooI had to pay shipping on the PCB from the states again. It also uses some unusual parts. I paid £30 shipping for 2 IC chips. The value of the chips was 40p.

2. It took me hours to find and order all the parts due to the weirdness of components

3. It's a nightmare to build. There's amps that use less components, there's a few micro SMD things in there too which are a pain to do without frying them. Also a very tight squeeze. I struggled getting the dc adapter in.

4. Setting it up (biasing the BBD etc ) is a huge faff, making microscopic adjustments on internal trimmers took me about 2 hours to get right on both pedals.

5. Controls - WTF is slew I cannot tell you what it does.

After all that it it makes your guitar sound weird and broken.

Was it worth it? yes.



NOTE: My complaints are directed at Fairfield Circuitry not Pedal PCB. I think theyve done a great job making a weird beast like this possible.

 

[Robert]

5. Controls - WTF is slew I cannot tell you what it does.

The microcontroller generates a random LFO waveform. (solid line)

Slew controls the amount of smoothing applied to that random waveform. (dotted line)

 

[grobbins]

The microcontroller generates a random LFO waveform. (solid line)

Slew controls the amount of smoothing applied to that random waveform. (dotted line)

View attachment 77797

Thank you. This actually makes a lot of sense now its visualised!

 

[giovanni]

Cool graphics!

 

[sam2020howard]

Did a spider spin web by your input and output jacks?

 

[grobbins]

Did a spider spin web by your input and output jacks?

Haha no, so id put a 12mm hole in for the power but realised that would not fit so had to put an 8mm DC in instead with a washer, I put some hot glue to help keep it in place and it looks like that went everywhere

 

[andare]

I fumbled mine hard. I bought anotgher board and one day I will reattempt this. This time I'm gonna usae SMD J201s soldered directly to the board because I can't do the math involved in using them on adapter boards.

Great job on the graphics! Let's hear it.

 

[grobbins]

I fumbled mine hard. I bought anotgher board and one day I will reattempt this. This time I'm gonna usae SMD J201s soldered directly to the board because I can't do the math involved in using them on adapter boards.

Great job on the graphics! Let's hear it.

Cheers yeah definitely the most challenging build I've done! Yeah the smds are actually not too bad so give them a try.

I won't post a video of how it sounds to encourage you to get yours sorted ha, good luck

 

[Einzeln]

For me it would be around 90 euro for a kit including knobs housing and shipping at musikding. How much would that be in the UK?

 

[grobbins]

For me it would be around 90 euro including knobs housing and shipping at musikding. How much would that be in the UK?

I think I paid a similar amount after buying the PCB shipping to the UK and all the fancy parts, I remember thinking I should have bought on musikding

 

[andare]

I paid about 60 Euros for my build. I got the PCB and faceplate from here and sourced the enclosure and ICs from a couple of European stores. And it doesn't work As I increase the Mix, no effect comes in. I tried swapping ICs, checked and rechecked my solder joints etc but since I also messed up the LED and footswitch I thought it best to start from scratch. At least I can reuse all the ICs.
Interestingly enough, the only pedals I messed up are this complex one and the simplest one of all, the Squidward.

 

[HamishR]

It never fails to impress me how many parts can be used to build a pedal to fuck up a perfectly good guitar sound.

Nice work Mr Grobbins!