Ceasar Chorus but more difficult for no reason

falco_femoralis

falco_femoralis

Well-known member
One of my favorite pedals companies is Jam Pedals. I love their aesthetic and simplicity. I wanted to make something like their Ripply Fall, but modulation circuits are too big to just mash together and call it good. So I picked a cool chorus and put it in a 1590bb along with feetswitch to control my Deluxe Reverb's Tremolo and Reverb effects. I wanted the foot controls to be arranged like the Ripply Fall, but there also had to be room for the jacks and the other footswitchi, which meant I had to use a momentary footswitch with a relay board so it could fit above the circuit board.

I built the pedal and it didn't work. The modulation section wasn't working properly. I had to take the pedal apart to check the board out and troubleshoot, which was not fun considering the layout. So I rebuilt it, and this time I tried to make it more friendly to troubleshooting. However, once this was put together, the relay footswitch worked intermittently. What a fucking bummer since I hot glued the relay board to the back of the main board. So much for making it easier to troubleshoot. So I ripped the pedal apart again and shelved the PCB's while I could mull it over and work it out. When I did this, I found that one of the footswitch wires for the relay board was split open. At least it was an easy fix. Also, I sourced some NOS bbd chips from Small Bear, but after some reading discovered one or both are likely chinese fakes. So I purchased some cool audio units and here we are.

So this is the third time building this one. The enclosure is a little worse for wear as I wasn't gentle with it after the second time the pedal came apart. But I'd come so far and I was going to see it through.

Here's where we start: both boards are built and the enclosure is drilled. I wanted the knobs four across the top.
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So this is where we're at with knobs and switches. Everything is off board
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Starting with the wiring. I'm trying to tuck everything down as much as possible as there's going to be quite a bit
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Here is the wiring for the boards. The pots are done, the two boards are connected, and the power and ground wires are on the main board. I haven't done the wiring for the relay board yet. The first time I put this together, I had the relay board hot glued to the underside of the main board and I wired everything up before moving it into the enclosure, but doing it that way I had to guess how long to make each wire and it was more of a mess than I'd like. This time around I set it up so the relay board is off to the side and I'm able to add the wires as I go and make sure they're all the correct length
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Here I've put the boards in. The relay board and main board are wired up, and the pots are wired to the main board. The main board is attached to the enclosure thru the waveform toggle switch. The power and ground wires are attached to the main board. They are long enough that they will be routed to the power connector and then over to the relay board. I'm using the extra ground solder pads on the main board as a ground bus so I can connect the grounds of the jacks, LEDs for the two other toggle switches, and the relay board without it getting too weird with the wires. Because it's not like that already
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And here we are. The stereo jack for the amp controls fits in the ceasar's cutout. The relay board is wedged in between the jack and footswitch with a healthy amount of hot glue on the back. I used a common anode tricolor LED for the indicator - red for tremolo, blue for reverb, and green for chorus. Wonder of wonders - the board works.
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Here's the top view. This layout was worth the insanity inside the enclosure
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And the indicator changes colors for the other circuits. The LED changes to the composite colors of each circuit if two are on - the trem and chorus make an orange indicator light, for example
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The ceasar sounds great! I love the blend control. A while ago I built a Cepheid chorus but this has just a bit more to play with. I'm glad I stuck with it. The toggle switch is a super low profile short bat, and I set the height of the two lower footsweetch so they actuate above the toggle switch but below the center footswitch. I'm a bit bummed the relay switch doesn't make the sound we all love.
 
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I think this is great and I love the tricolor LED but I also know that there's no way I would be able to remember which effect each color is, especially live on stage.
For my last gig I had to rehearse pedal switching during songs so I wouldn't make a mess :)
 
andare said:
I think this is great and I love the tricolor LED but I also know that there's no way I would be able to remember which effect each color is, especially live on stage.
For my last gig I had to rehearse pedal switching during songs so I wouldn't make a mess :)
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I've run into this too, so now for my double pedals I always make the left one red. I'm not sure if anyone else gets this, but it's the same as navigation lights on airplanes, ships, and police cars - red is on the left, and green or blue is on the right. For some reason that is an intuitive way for me to remember. And then I try to associate colors with effects - reverb seems like a blue effect to me, since it tends to make the sound feel colder (spring reverb anyway) and chorus sounds like being underwater, and it makes me think of the bahamas, where the water is a teal/green color. I try to associate the effects with feelings so it's easier to be creative since I don't have to stop and think
 
falco_femoralis said:
I've run into this too, so now for my double pedals I always make the left one red. I'm not sure if anyone else gets this, but it's the same as navigation lights on airplanes, ships, and police cars - red is on the left, and green or blue is on the right. For some reason that is an intuitive way for me to remember. And then I try to associate colors with effects - reverb seems like a blue effect to me, since it tends to make the sound feel colder (spring reverb anyway) and chorus sounds like being underwater, and it makes me think of the bahamas, where the water is a teal/green color. I try to associate the effects with feelings so it's easier to be creative since I don't have to stop and think
Click to expand...

Your Sound-Association with colour is a cool idea.

For bypass, I've adopted BLUE for TWO, or channel switching.
So wherever the main/first circuit is or where its stomper gets located it's usually green but sometimes other colours (amber, white, purple...).

I only use red for clipping-LEDs, but occasionally I'll use red for bypass if it fits a theme planned for the rest of the pedal.



OH, and I love jewel-lights on pedals.
 
I used to have a rule of red LEDs for OD and Blue for fuzz. But since then I have been building dual OD pedals so that has gone out the window and I rarely use fuzz anyway!

Maybe using skinnier wire may have left more space? But super impressive! I think I would have gone crazy trying to keep track of everything.
 
^ I bumped my off board pot wiring from 20ga down to 24, thinking the same thing

Bad news on the chorus front - it was fine at first but I went to play it yesterday and the rate control was behaving erratically. I couldn't assign a pattern to it - it would be full on fast, then if I turned the pedal off and one of the other footswitches on it would revert back to where the knob would indicate, then if I hit one of the secondary footswitches it would go back to being fast, but not every time. And the toggle did weird things as well.

I took the pedal apart, disconnecting things one by one until I found that the culprit was the toggle switch - it must have had some internal fault or maybe was leaning at just the wrong angle, or when I removed the old one it damaged the circuit board. But once I removed the switch the rate knob began behaving normally. So I'm pretty sure this PCB wants to be in its own enclosure and not play nicely with the others. That's ok, it can go in a vertical 1590bb with some big knobs that are on some good old board mounted pots and it'll have a cool flashy lfo led.

Unless...
https://www.hammfg.com/part/1590BX2
 
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