rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
What a fun build! This is a report on the 6-band EQ, a generic equalizer (not based on any particular pedal). I selected this build because I want my entire pedalboard to be homemade, and feel like an EQ is a necessity. Also, I wanted to try a build with sliders.
Inspiration
I struggled to find a good bird theme - something with a "6" in the name? Nothing. Something related to equalizing? That's weird. So I resorted to a pun and went with the "Eaglizer" - basing it on the Stellar's Sea Eagle with a stormy oceanic background. The Stellar's Sea Eagle is the heaviest eagle in the world, and it lives in Northeast Russia and Japan. It's face is both intimidating... and also a bit like a muppet.
I'm very happy with how the design turned out, especially the waves and storm clouds - Besides my birds, I'm mostly trying to work with a relatively limited set of geometric elements on my pedals. The enclosure is a Tayda Pearl Gray enclosure, which really has a handsome look to it. This was the first enclosure where I decided to try using a 3mm LED and bezel and I think I'll move to that in the future (although I have a huge stash of cheap 5mm bezels from Tayda to go through).
The Build
The build was quite enjoyable.
I used this drill template, I think originally from @Bricksnbeatles, but moved the LED since I prefer it to the side of the footswitch. I didn't want to complate drilling this beast!
The Tayda sliders linked in the build doc were out of date, but these sliders had the same specs, so I went with them and they worked fine. There's no unusual parts beyond needing to get some brass standoffs and screws, easily avalable from Tayda. That leads to my one mistake on the build. The order of assembly is not obvious, and you must attach the standoffs to the bottom PCB before attaching the top PCB: two of the screw holes are inaccessible when the top PCB is mounted. I tried mounting with just two standoffs and attaching the others only to the case but not the PCB, and that worked fine - the mounting is solid enough.
The other challenge is fitting everything in. My go-to jacks are these from Stompboxparts - I like them because they're relatively small, have sharp points that dig into the case to ground and to avoid rotation, and I feel more comfortable with enclosed jacks. Before them, I would use these ultra-cheap jacks, which usually worked OK but were pretty crappy and seemed to cause problems - I won't go back to them. Neither of those jack styles fit into the build comfortably. Luckily I had a few Lumberg jacks floating around, and those barely just fit. And I used an outie DC jack, which also just barely fit (if you're not aware, Tayda sells these for $0.16 and they have worked fine for me so far).
I made no substitutions and the pedal booted right up with no noise at all.
Any recommendations for knobs/nubbins/indicators to put on the sliders? I ordered a pack from Amazon that ended up being way too big.
The Pedal
It's an equalizer, not much to add. I hadn't played with a physical EQ before but I'd really wanted one to shape tone, rather than relying on so many different overdrive pedal variations that end up sounding similar. I figured it would be powerful, and I was right. It's really flexible and I'm considering building a second or third because of how useful it is and how fun the build was. I've had this built for ~2 weeks and it's basically an always-on pedal for me, it does the equalizer thing and has no background noise, so I feel comfortable posting the build report.
Firsts
Pedal rating: 5/5
Inspiration
I struggled to find a good bird theme - something with a "6" in the name? Nothing. Something related to equalizing? That's weird. So I resorted to a pun and went with the "Eaglizer" - basing it on the Stellar's Sea Eagle with a stormy oceanic background. The Stellar's Sea Eagle is the heaviest eagle in the world, and it lives in Northeast Russia and Japan. It's face is both intimidating... and also a bit like a muppet.
I'm very happy with how the design turned out, especially the waves and storm clouds - Besides my birds, I'm mostly trying to work with a relatively limited set of geometric elements on my pedals. The enclosure is a Tayda Pearl Gray enclosure, which really has a handsome look to it. This was the first enclosure where I decided to try using a 3mm LED and bezel and I think I'll move to that in the future (although I have a huge stash of cheap 5mm bezels from Tayda to go through).
The Build
The build was quite enjoyable.
I used this drill template, I think originally from @Bricksnbeatles, but moved the LED since I prefer it to the side of the footswitch. I didn't want to complate drilling this beast!
The Tayda sliders linked in the build doc were out of date, but these sliders had the same specs, so I went with them and they worked fine. There's no unusual parts beyond needing to get some brass standoffs and screws, easily avalable from Tayda. That leads to my one mistake on the build. The order of assembly is not obvious, and you must attach the standoffs to the bottom PCB before attaching the top PCB: two of the screw holes are inaccessible when the top PCB is mounted. I tried mounting with just two standoffs and attaching the others only to the case but not the PCB, and that worked fine - the mounting is solid enough.
The other challenge is fitting everything in. My go-to jacks are these from Stompboxparts - I like them because they're relatively small, have sharp points that dig into the case to ground and to avoid rotation, and I feel more comfortable with enclosed jacks. Before them, I would use these ultra-cheap jacks, which usually worked OK but were pretty crappy and seemed to cause problems - I won't go back to them. Neither of those jack styles fit into the build comfortably. Luckily I had a few Lumberg jacks floating around, and those barely just fit. And I used an outie DC jack, which also just barely fit (if you're not aware, Tayda sells these for $0.16 and they have worked fine for me so far).
I made no substitutions and the pedal booted right up with no noise at all.
Any recommendations for knobs/nubbins/indicators to put on the sliders? I ordered a pack from Amazon that ended up being way too big.
The Pedal
It's an equalizer, not much to add. I hadn't played with a physical EQ before but I'd really wanted one to shape tone, rather than relying on so many different overdrive pedal variations that end up sounding similar. I figured it would be powerful, and I was right. It's really flexible and I'm considering building a second or third because of how useful it is and how fun the build was. I've had this built for ~2 weeks and it's basically an always-on pedal for me, it does the equalizer thing and has no background noise, so I feel comfortable posting the build report.
Firsts
- First build with sliders
- First double-layer build
- First equalizer pedal
Pedal rating: 5/5
