mkstewartesq
Well-known member
- Build Rating
I guess this is kind of actually almost more a story about my personal trials and tribulations in building than it is about the actual pedal.
I didn’t even embark on this hobby until February 2023 and since then I kind of went on a manic tear of building pedals. By September 2023, I had completed about 25 builds consisting of various single petals and four or five 2-in-1s and a 7-loop switcher with input and output buffers. (I have various build reports on those in this forum). But because life got in the way, I actually had to take a short break and this Circulator is the first pedal I have built in about two months.
Oddly and completely unexpectedly, when I got back into it, even though only two months had passed, I felt like I had forgotten everything about building. I just felt really tentative about everything I was doing from soldering to wiring to drilling. I was sure I was making mistakes left and right and what had been second nature just a few months ago all felt completely new (and a little scary) to me.
So I don’t know whether it was the actual build or my own personal weirdness going on, but this felt like a much tighter build than I am used to with PedalPCB boards. Footswitch right up against the bottom of the PCB so that I had to use spare resistor leads to wire it up rather than stranded or solid core wire. LED on the board didn’t quite match the hole on the drill template so I had to bend the LED a bit to make it fit in the enclosure (although that is probably my own error in measuring and drilling). Plus I completely forgot how to do art in Adobe illustrator.
The build felt so tight to me that I really had to plan and coordinate a lot of different things just to get it into the box – in fact, this was the first time I have ever had to “box it before I rock it” and just pray that it worked the very first time. Which, luckily, it did. If I had had to take it out to troubleshoot, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to get it back in the box.
There are tons of better demos than I could ever do out there but my pedal sounds as expected. It is a different sound from the XC Phase so it makes a nice complement to that pedal. Less crunchy than a JFET-based phaser, definitely more transparent, and a bit more “spacey“ with the Resonance control that almost gives it a vaguely “synth-like” sound as it goes through the sweeps.
I’ll have to wait a bit to pass judgment on the Vibe function because I’ve just never played around with Vibes much before and I’m not sure I really get on with the “pitch shifting” effect – I also need to find the EQD Grand Orbiter user manual to really figure out how to use this pedal as intended, as well as also to verify that, in vibe mode, the depth control really seems to act as a volume control (at least that’s the way it seems to work on my build).
In any event, it’s good to be back into the swing of things and have gotten my feet wet again so that hopefully, on my next build (a Moonshot tremolo), these feelings of everything being “foreign” will be behind me and I can pick up my normal pace again.
Thanks for reading and for joining me on this journey of self-psychoanalysis.
Mike
I didn’t even embark on this hobby until February 2023 and since then I kind of went on a manic tear of building pedals. By September 2023, I had completed about 25 builds consisting of various single petals and four or five 2-in-1s and a 7-loop switcher with input and output buffers. (I have various build reports on those in this forum). But because life got in the way, I actually had to take a short break and this Circulator is the first pedal I have built in about two months.
Oddly and completely unexpectedly, when I got back into it, even though only two months had passed, I felt like I had forgotten everything about building. I just felt really tentative about everything I was doing from soldering to wiring to drilling. I was sure I was making mistakes left and right and what had been second nature just a few months ago all felt completely new (and a little scary) to me.
So I don’t know whether it was the actual build or my own personal weirdness going on, but this felt like a much tighter build than I am used to with PedalPCB boards. Footswitch right up against the bottom of the PCB so that I had to use spare resistor leads to wire it up rather than stranded or solid core wire. LED on the board didn’t quite match the hole on the drill template so I had to bend the LED a bit to make it fit in the enclosure (although that is probably my own error in measuring and drilling). Plus I completely forgot how to do art in Adobe illustrator.
The build felt so tight to me that I really had to plan and coordinate a lot of different things just to get it into the box – in fact, this was the first time I have ever had to “box it before I rock it” and just pray that it worked the very first time. Which, luckily, it did. If I had had to take it out to troubleshoot, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to get it back in the box.
There are tons of better demos than I could ever do out there but my pedal sounds as expected. It is a different sound from the XC Phase so it makes a nice complement to that pedal. Less crunchy than a JFET-based phaser, definitely more transparent, and a bit more “spacey“ with the Resonance control that almost gives it a vaguely “synth-like” sound as it goes through the sweeps.
I’ll have to wait a bit to pass judgment on the Vibe function because I’ve just never played around with Vibes much before and I’m not sure I really get on with the “pitch shifting” effect – I also need to find the EQD Grand Orbiter user manual to really figure out how to use this pedal as intended, as well as also to verify that, in vibe mode, the depth control really seems to act as a volume control (at least that’s the way it seems to work on my build).
In any event, it’s good to be back into the swing of things and have gotten my feet wet again so that hopefully, on my next build (a Moonshot tremolo), these feelings of everything being “foreign” will be behind me and I can pick up my normal pace again.
Thanks for reading and for joining me on this journey of self-psychoanalysis.
Mike
