Just finished this build this week, and absolutely love this pedal. Had never played a KoT circuit in person (I'm about 3 years down the list on Analogman's waitlist), but I understand why people love this circuit. Definitely a keeper for my board.
What do you think of blue and cream knobs? Kept the design as simple as possible while still evoking the KoT. I didn't use the color I intended for the Tayda UV printing so it's a really pale greyish color instead of gold, but still looks pretty nice.
I used a the "warmer" mods @ckaudioeffects documented here, omitting all the other mods (most of which aren't relevant/feasible for the Mini). I don't have any other KoTs to compare with, but it does sound warm and full with the modded values. There's a good amount of lower end without getting muddy, at least with my Tele.
(If you do the capacitor mods, don't do what I did and assume both channels are arranged in exactly the same way. C4 and C17 are in slightly different places on the PCB between the two channels. I missed that and placed two capacitors incorrectly at first. Including a diagram attach to this post in case it helps anyone else wanting to mod their Paragon Mini.)
I used 10k resistors in R3 and R20 as @MichaelW suggested (apparently the value in the original KoT) and used B250k pots in place of B100k for the two Drive pots per @Chuck D. Bones. With those values, the Drive knobs have really wide sweep from mostly clean to very dirty. So far, I'm liking having the right/red channel cranked and the left/yellow channel set to light drive.
I went with BA282 diodes in place of MA856 and 1N914 in place of 1S1588, and used DIP-6 sockets so I can experiment, though haven't had a chance to do that yet. So far, I really prefer the soft clipping at both higher and lower gain settings and currently have both channels set that way. I've got a bunch of the diodes people suggested on here, so maybe I'll like some other options for the hard clippers.
What do you think of blue and cream knobs? Kept the design as simple as possible while still evoking the KoT. I didn't use the color I intended for the Tayda UV printing so it's a really pale greyish color instead of gold, but still looks pretty nice.
I used a the "warmer" mods @ckaudioeffects documented here, omitting all the other mods (most of which aren't relevant/feasible for the Mini). I don't have any other KoTs to compare with, but it does sound warm and full with the modded values. There's a good amount of lower end without getting muddy, at least with my Tele.
(If you do the capacitor mods, don't do what I did and assume both channels are arranged in exactly the same way. C4 and C17 are in slightly different places on the PCB between the two channels. I missed that and placed two capacitors incorrectly at first. Including a diagram attach to this post in case it helps anyone else wanting to mod their Paragon Mini.)
I used 10k resistors in R3 and R20 as @MichaelW suggested (apparently the value in the original KoT) and used B250k pots in place of B100k for the two Drive pots per @Chuck D. Bones. With those values, the Drive knobs have really wide sweep from mostly clean to very dirty. So far, I'm liking having the right/red channel cranked and the left/yellow channel set to light drive.
I went with BA282 diodes in place of MA856 and 1N914 in place of 1S1588, and used DIP-6 sockets so I can experiment, though haven't had a chance to do that yet. So far, I really prefer the soft clipping at both higher and lower gain settings and currently have both channels set that way. I've got a bunch of the diodes people suggested on here, so maybe I'll like some other options for the hard clippers.
Attachments
Last edited:
