Circulator: "Albatross Phaser"

[rwl]

Build Rating

5.00 star(s)

This is a report for the Circulator, based on the EQD Grand Orbiter. I saw this recommended on a few "favorites" lists here on the forum, and I wanted to build a phaser so it was an easy selection.

This is one of my favorite pedals and I'd recommend the build to anyone.



Inspiration
I settled on the bird for this pretty quickly, but the design took a while. The bird is a Great Albatross, an enormous seabird - one of the biggest birds in the world - and one that flies around the globe. So it fits the circulator/orbiter theme.

I always wanted to have a large bird depicted circling a sphere. Initially I had a view of the earth from space and a relatively realistic bird, but I just couldn't make that work. So I decided to switch it up and go with a synthwave style, since those almost always feature some kind of stylized orb in the sky - usually the sun.

That worked out, and then I had to restyle the rest of the design with synthwave tropes. I printed this on the Tayda metallic orange, which looks great.

I'm very happy with the design overall, the colors are bold an interesting. It's one of my favorites.

The Build
I built this a few months back. I'd held onto the PCB for a bit, anticipating it would be a challenging build, but I recall being surprised how straightforward it was. For such a cool effect, the build is pretty simple, and I don't recall any hard-to-find parts, or much challenge at all. A lot of the pcb is taken up by the ICs, so there's not even that many parts required. After the build, it turned right on without any problems. Notably, I didn't have to do any biasing or matching of transistors for it, so it was basically just a matter of soldering.

I housed it in a plain enclosure for a month or two while I worked out the design, then rehoused it in its present enclosure.

The Pedal
It's great! To be honest, I don't have another phaser to compare it to so maybe I just like the effect. I want to build more since this one is so much fun.

The sound is full, and there's a lot of variation available. I like the resonance knob, which adds a richness to the tone even if the phasing isn't prominent. Mostly I tend to leave the switches set to "3" (where the phaser is most obvious) and to "P," although having a vibrato option is nice.

This has been a permanent fixture on my smaller pedalboard since I've built it, and I don't think it'll leave anytime soon.

Firsts

• First vaporwave-style pedal
• First phaser

Build rating: 5/5
Pedal rating: 5/5

 

[drgonzo1969]

I love the artwork! Great build report!

 

[drgonzo1969]

The bird circling the globe is a super cool and fitting image for a phaser. Really well thought out impressive build.

 

[rwl]

My process is to draw the images in Photoshop. That usually takes a few hours - it's a combination of tracing, hand-drawing with a Wacom tablet, adding gradients, positioning, getting text colors right, etc. My goal is to have smooth or straight lines that are easy to vectorize. I flatten that to a PNG, and then I open it in Illustrator.

In Illustrator, I find settings that look good for the conversion to a vector and then do some final touchups (usually important details like eyes that can get wonky when vectorized), as well as merging all the vector shapes so there's no overlap. I might write up a tutorial at some point about my process.

I always have 3 layers in Illustrator, for gloss, color and white. I've kept it simple and all my prints are a solid block of colors (ie, no cutouts), and my entire print will have a white background. I do a matte gloss across the entire thing as well to keep it simple.

I've exclusively used Tayda for UV printing, and all my posted builds are UV printed. It looks professional, it's easy, and it's so cheap ($4.50 for the print and gloss if I order 10 print jobs at once).

The enclosure is Metallic Candy Orange. All the metallic enclosures I've gotten from Tayda look really good in person. They're a little tacky, so for a more "serious" build I wouldn't use them, but for a build like this they're great.

 

[jjjimi84]

Not only do I love the pedal but absolutely loved the write up! Incredible job!