Band of Dans
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This one's been on my bench in a partially complete state for a looong time. The confirmation email from Aion dates to March 2024! This is the last in a series of preamps I built starting a couple of years ago and I'm stoked to have it all finished up.
There are so many dang parts so I pretty much stuck to the build docs on this one. The only sub I can remember is the pair of copulating caps at C44 and C34; apparently I ran out of 22n's and 100p's and wasn't willing to wait for more. I didn't even remember they were int there and had to laugh when opening it up for the photo
. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.
The layout and drill template were pretty intimidating and were probably the biggest contributor to my procrastination on this thing. If you're building one of these, it's kind of a no-brainer to go with Tayda's flat rate drilling service and I'll cross-post a link to the drill template discussion started by @chongmagic for future travelers. For the layout I basically recreated @Surgo's ideas from this thread as well as some of the original pre-builts that were floating around online. Notable exceptions being a more compressed font and some minor layout tweaks. I also recreated the LAB SERIES logo from scratch. Happy to share my final print files if anybody wants them.
How's it sound? Pretty good! The mids and multifilter controls are very powerful and unique among my collection of pedals. Over-driven tones are pleasing to my ears and I could see how you could get away with this as your only tone-shaping and overdrive pedal in a lot of situations. There's definitely a fine line to ride; it can get a bit farty with too much bass or *very* ice-picky with too much treble or mid boost. As others here have mentioned, the compressor/limiter is a bit odd and is interactive with /dependent on the master volume settings, so I don't find myself wanting to use it much. Though I'm sure you'd get used to it if you used this thing all the time.
I've since swapped out those tabbed washers with plain ones. This thing cleaned me out of a lot of stuff, ha.
Some day I'll go back in to swap out those caps and clean things up with some IPA and a cotton swab. Some day....
This was a surprisingly fun build. Time- and sanity-saving strategies I'd recommend: take your time, measure/verify caps and transistors if you have a component tester, stick to ICs from mouser (or similar) so you can skip the DIP8 sockets, and use a verified drill template with Tayda's drill service.
There are so many dang parts so I pretty much stuck to the build docs on this one. The only sub I can remember is the pair of copulating caps at C44 and C34; apparently I ran out of 22n's and 100p's and wasn't willing to wait for more. I didn't even remember they were int there and had to laugh when opening it up for the photo
. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.The layout and drill template were pretty intimidating and were probably the biggest contributor to my procrastination on this thing. If you're building one of these, it's kind of a no-brainer to go with Tayda's flat rate drilling service and I'll cross-post a link to the drill template discussion started by @chongmagic for future travelers. For the layout I basically recreated @Surgo's ideas from this thread as well as some of the original pre-builts that were floating around online. Notable exceptions being a more compressed font and some minor layout tweaks. I also recreated the LAB SERIES logo from scratch. Happy to share my final print files if anybody wants them.
How's it sound? Pretty good! The mids and multifilter controls are very powerful and unique among my collection of pedals. Over-driven tones are pleasing to my ears and I could see how you could get away with this as your only tone-shaping and overdrive pedal in a lot of situations. There's definitely a fine line to ride; it can get a bit farty with too much bass or *very* ice-picky with too much treble or mid boost. As others here have mentioned, the compressor/limiter is a bit odd and is interactive with /dependent on the master volume settings, so I don't find myself wanting to use it much. Though I'm sure you'd get used to it if you used this thing all the time.
I've since swapped out those tabbed washers with plain ones. This thing cleaned me out of a lot of stuff, ha.
Some day I'll go back in to swap out those caps and clean things up with some IPA and a cotton swab. Some day....
This was a surprisingly fun build. Time- and sanity-saving strategies I'd recommend: take your time, measure/verify caps and transistors if you have a component tester, stick to ICs from mouser (or similar) so you can skip the DIP8 sockets, and use a verified drill template with Tayda's drill service.
