Madbean EgoDeath

jhaneyzz

Well-known member
Fresh off the bench.

Madbean EgoDeath. "Fulltone OCD-ish"

Super easy build
A couple of non-standard (at least for me) components (2N7000 mosfets and the mini dip switch) plus it requires 4 different 9mm pots....

I used one long shaft SPDT and on short because that's what I had in the drawers.

This is the first build using my "Carnelian Spheres" as indicators. They look great in the photo but they are far too opaque to easily light. You can see in the gut shot that I had to rig up a 3 LED backlight to even get it this bright.

It sounds absolutely awesome.

DRIVE: The drive control is super flexible, going from hardly any, to quite a lot and the Trim control changes the amount of low end going in to the gain stage and adds a ton of flexibility in the "voice" of the gain.

Clipping Switch According to the documentation the clip switch is described like this:
"SC/HC - Hard-clipping mode (left) is the stock OCD™ setting. In the right position, the switch moves the clipping diodes to the feedback loop of the IC. It’s not a drastic change in tone, but does soften it up a bit."
Frankly I tried a dozen different combinations of settings and playing and could never discern any difference whatsoever.

DIP switches:
The documentation has this to say about the DIP - "This 2-pos dip switch allows you to short the germanium diodes in series with the mosfet clippers. The germaniums are active in the down position of each switch, and shorted in the up position. The stock OCD™ setting is right switch down and left up. You can use any combination on the DIP switch for slightly different coloration."
Again, I tried every combination of settings I could think of for 10 minutes and couldn't hear even the slightest difference.

POWER - "The POWER control is intended to balance between low and high output pickups. In the LO position (left) the audio signal passes through a single 33k resistor before the output buffer. In the HI (right) a 22k resistor is added in parallel to reduce the overall resistance, thus increasing the output level. This setting will be somewhat brighter, as well"

This works as advertised, sounds great with my Reverend Charger 290 (P90s in the neck and bridge) on the LO setting. High was too bright, for my taste even when using both the neck and bridge) but this could be awesome for darker sounding guitars.

So, the basic functionality is awesome, the tones available are great and tweaking with the Trim pot adds some great flexibility to the pedal, Just don't expect any magic to come from the clipping options.

I'm going to be playing king of the hill on the pedal board with this guy for a while. really looking forward to A/B testing against my ZenDrive builds.



IMG_6705.jpg

IMG_6706.jpg
 
I'm particularly pleased with the way I hand wired the 3 LED harness to just barely fit in the gap between the jacks. and yes. that is a socket on the positive lead of the LED. I played around with CLR values and tested to get the voltage as high as possible, and YES you can fry leds if you don't follow the guidance in a good CLR calculator... workshop still smells like burning plastic.
 
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