rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This is my report on a build of the Dunwich Amplification Cthulhu Fuzz (the one-knob silicon version). It's a great-sounding doomy fuzz. You can download the gerber here.
Inspiration
What kind of bird would you associate most with Lovecraft? Perhaps a crow or raven, but I am keeping those birds in reserve. Besides, I don't think they're appropriately eerie. Something more nocturnal, like an owl? Also not that creepy, and I have enough owl pedals already that I didn't want to do it without good cause.
Instead I went with a Whippoorwill, which shows up in some Lovecraft stories, and has an eerie, swampy sort of vibe. The whippoorwill is a type of nightjar, one of my favorite families of birds, just because of how weird they look. I wanted it to look somewhat moonlit, and went with a big yellow knob and a yellow/orange LED. I'm quite happy with the design. In the background, to accent the bird and to hammer home the Cthulhu reference, I have some faint tentacles that are almost the color of the enclosure.
I gotta say that I'm pretty happy with this design overall. If I were to make changes I might adjust the font or try to remove a little bit of detail from the bird. The design is UV printed on Tayda pearl grey.
The Build
I messed up the board. The PCB is my own, and for one knob designs, I had been trying to get the board and all its components to fit behind the pot. But I hadn't tried to seriously box any of those layouts... well, when you do that (PCB up behind the pot's sleeve) you end up with components very close to both the audio jacks and the power jack. If they're caps, they'll collide with audio jacks, and the board itself will interfere with the power. To deal with this, you'd have to move the pot down signficantly in the enclosure, which would interfere with the nice blank space to have a full-featured design. Anyway, this wasn't many components, so I ended up reworking the PCB and getting it fabricated twice (so I could reuse the enclosure I'd already had printed with the knob placed). Oops!
Besides that, it's a pretty simple build, not many components, and it worked both times. I built it according to the trace, but substituted a 2N3904 in place of a 2N5008. It appears that the designer from Dunwich confirmed this is correct. To keep it quieter, I used shielded wiring. All told, a pretty basic build that I threw together in two hours.
The Pedal
It's supposed to be a fuzz face with an additional gain stage. It sounds great - I think this is really the only doomy fuzz that I've boxed up (that's not to say it's the best - I've made a bunch of doomy sounding boards or vero traces but never got around to boxing them for one reason or another. Maybe the Acapulco gold is closest in tone).
This thing is loud, and maybe gets a bit too harsh for my tastes when the knob is past 2 o'clock. Anyway, I'd recommend it. It's staying on my board for now.
Firsts
Pedal rating: 5/5
Inspiration
What kind of bird would you associate most with Lovecraft? Perhaps a crow or raven, but I am keeping those birds in reserve. Besides, I don't think they're appropriately eerie. Something more nocturnal, like an owl? Also not that creepy, and I have enough owl pedals already that I didn't want to do it without good cause.
Instead I went with a Whippoorwill, which shows up in some Lovecraft stories, and has an eerie, swampy sort of vibe. The whippoorwill is a type of nightjar, one of my favorite families of birds, just because of how weird they look. I wanted it to look somewhat moonlit, and went with a big yellow knob and a yellow/orange LED. I'm quite happy with the design. In the background, to accent the bird and to hammer home the Cthulhu reference, I have some faint tentacles that are almost the color of the enclosure.
I gotta say that I'm pretty happy with this design overall. If I were to make changes I might adjust the font or try to remove a little bit of detail from the bird. The design is UV printed on Tayda pearl grey.
The Build
I messed up the board. The PCB is my own, and for one knob designs, I had been trying to get the board and all its components to fit behind the pot. But I hadn't tried to seriously box any of those layouts... well, when you do that (PCB up behind the pot's sleeve) you end up with components very close to both the audio jacks and the power jack. If they're caps, they'll collide with audio jacks, and the board itself will interfere with the power. To deal with this, you'd have to move the pot down signficantly in the enclosure, which would interfere with the nice blank space to have a full-featured design. Anyway, this wasn't many components, so I ended up reworking the PCB and getting it fabricated twice (so I could reuse the enclosure I'd already had printed with the knob placed). Oops!
Besides that, it's a pretty simple build, not many components, and it worked both times. I built it according to the trace, but substituted a 2N3904 in place of a 2N5008. It appears that the designer from Dunwich confirmed this is correct. To keep it quieter, I used shielded wiring. All told, a pretty basic build that I threw together in two hours.
The Pedal
It's supposed to be a fuzz face with an additional gain stage. It sounds great - I think this is really the only doomy fuzz that I've boxed up (that's not to say it's the best - I've made a bunch of doomy sounding boards or vero traces but never got around to boxing them for one reason or another. Maybe the Acapulco gold is closest in tone).
This thing is loud, and maybe gets a bit too harsh for my tastes when the knob is past 2 o'clock. Anyway, I'd recommend it. It's staying on my board for now.
Firsts
First Lovecraft pedal
Pedal rating: 5/5
