rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
My first build report! I've called this the Pelagia. It's a Caesar Chorus (based on the Walrus Julia). The name and theme is based on the pelagic cormorant, a common diving water bird that I thought fit the watery tone and style of the original pedal. Where I live, you can often see these birds along the coast or estuaries sunning themselves with their wings out, since their feathers aren't waterproof!
I built this about two weeks ago and at the time it was both my first chorus, my most complicated pedal so far, and the first that I'd had UV printed on Tayda. The build was a tight fit. I tend to use daughter boards (either PedalPCB or from 3PDT on Amazon), but found they couldn't fit into the enclosure.
Besides that, this build does have some components that I don't particularly like and which I'm trying to move away from: I'm hoping to use "outie" DC jacks once my current stock of innie jacks is used up. And the 1/4" audio jacks are some cheap ones from Amazon that I suspect keep causing shorts on other pedals I've built: the two leads rotate and can touch, or the entire jack can rotate and I think shorts against the enclosure. This pedal has been fine. I'm going to be tring some higher quality jacks in the future. I'm also using ceramic disc capacitors here, but trying to stock up on MLCC capacitors for the future (though besides tolerances I'm not sure what the problem is with ceramic discs - they've all seemed to work ok for me).
In terms of build quality, I think I'd built 7-8 pedals before this, but I still can never seem to get the wires the right length, or (as the footswitch wires here) I have them come out of a side of the board that doesn't make sense for the PCB. The build itself was smooth - powered right up and worked as I expected, though I haven't used the original pedal.
I have to give a shoutout to @Brett for his support on this thread with the UV process. I had already sent the PDF to Tayda when Brett reported that layers in my file didn't show up in Acrobat, but I'm happy to report that the print came out as expected anyway.
Overall I'm happy with the build and the pedal. I've found the chorus to be very usable to add background texture - I have it on most of the time. I don't tend to like the pulsing sound of a really intense chorus effect, but the range of the pedal is really broad and it's fun to play around with the settings. You can get some very intense effects.
I built this about two weeks ago and at the time it was both my first chorus, my most complicated pedal so far, and the first that I'd had UV printed on Tayda. The build was a tight fit. I tend to use daughter boards (either PedalPCB or from 3PDT on Amazon), but found they couldn't fit into the enclosure.
Besides that, this build does have some components that I don't particularly like and which I'm trying to move away from: I'm hoping to use "outie" DC jacks once my current stock of innie jacks is used up. And the 1/4" audio jacks are some cheap ones from Amazon that I suspect keep causing shorts on other pedals I've built: the two leads rotate and can touch, or the entire jack can rotate and I think shorts against the enclosure. This pedal has been fine. I'm going to be tring some higher quality jacks in the future. I'm also using ceramic disc capacitors here, but trying to stock up on MLCC capacitors for the future (though besides tolerances I'm not sure what the problem is with ceramic discs - they've all seemed to work ok for me).
In terms of build quality, I think I'd built 7-8 pedals before this, but I still can never seem to get the wires the right length, or (as the footswitch wires here) I have them come out of a side of the board that doesn't make sense for the PCB. The build itself was smooth - powered right up and worked as I expected, though I haven't used the original pedal.
I have to give a shoutout to @Brett for his support on this thread with the UV process. I had already sent the PDF to Tayda when Brett reported that layers in my file didn't show up in Acrobat, but I'm happy to report that the print came out as expected anyway.
Overall I'm happy with the build and the pedal. I've found the chorus to be very usable to add background texture - I have it on most of the time. I don't tend to like the pulsing sound of a really intense chorus effect, but the range of the pedal is really broad and it's fun to play around with the settings. You can get some very intense effects.
