Hirti
Well-known member
- Build Rating
I am not a huge fan of low gain pedals but this one has such a hype around here that I just had to build it, and boy does it deliver. 
I can totally see now why this is a favorite around here. I always struggle a bit with explaining guitar tones without falling into these cringe statements like "it sounds chewy with the drive up" but yeah, it just kinda does. Clean to the left of the drive pot and a pleasant low gain sound to the right. I really like how it sounds with my Strat.
At first, I thought the sag pot was a bit redundant. But after playing around for a while I started appreciating it a lot more. When sag is set to the left you get this "clean-ish" drive sound and to the right it adds a lot more grit and compression which I really like. I don't really use the settings in between those two so I could do with a switch to select between the two endpoints of the pot. People here usually recommend biasing the transistors to 6-6.6V and that worked for me for Q1. But Q2 had to he biased to around 7.2V or else I had this annoying squeals and oscillations when maxing the sag pot.
Where the pedal really shines - and I only found this out last week - is on bass. Put the drive and sag on max and this pedal adds such a good sound. This will be my main bass drive sound from now on. If you have a bass and built this one try it!
Last year I ordered twenty of the @szukalski smd relay pcbs on JLCPCB and I love them. Wiring is one of the parts of pedal building that annoys me the most and these PCBs make it super easy. Just solder on some 4 pin headers and two footswitch wires and boom, you are done. I will never use a normal 3PDT again (at least for PedalPCB builds).
The design came to my mind while being out running. It's a play on the classic friends logo. Tayda UV print on a white sand enclosure.
The one annoying thing about this build was the back plate of the enclosure. For some reason it is way smaller than the enclosure itself? It was a pain to put on. It's hard to take a picture of that but has anyone else ever experienced this issue? It's almost as if the back plate belongs to a different enclosure.
I can totally see now why this is a favorite around here. I always struggle a bit with explaining guitar tones without falling into these cringe statements like "it sounds chewy with the drive up" but yeah, it just kinda does. Clean to the left of the drive pot and a pleasant low gain sound to the right. I really like how it sounds with my Strat.At first, I thought the sag pot was a bit redundant. But after playing around for a while I started appreciating it a lot more. When sag is set to the left you get this "clean-ish" drive sound and to the right it adds a lot more grit and compression which I really like.
I don't really use the settings in between those two so I could do with a switch to select between the two endpoints of the pot. People here usually recommend biasing the transistors to 6-6.6V and that worked for me for Q1. But Q2 had to he biased to around 7.2V or else I had this annoying squeals and oscillations when maxing the sag pot.Where the pedal really shines - and I only found this out last week - is on bass. Put the drive and sag on max and this pedal adds such a good sound. This will be my main bass drive sound from now on. If you have a bass and built this one try it!
Last year I ordered twenty of the @szukalski smd relay pcbs on JLCPCB and I love them. Wiring is one of the parts of pedal building that annoys me the most and these PCBs make it super easy. Just solder on some 4 pin headers and two footswitch wires and boom, you are done. I will never use a normal 3PDT again (at least for PedalPCB builds).
The design came to my mind while being out running. It's a play on the classic friends logo. Tayda UV print on a white sand enclosure.
The one annoying thing about this build was the back plate of the enclosure. For some reason it is way smaller than the enclosure itself? It was a pain to put on. It's hard to take a picture of that but has anyone else ever experienced this issue? It's almost as if the back plate belongs to a different enclosure.
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