Doom (Parentheses Fuzz)

[SlowAudio]

Build Rating

5.00 star(s)

I know one other person here already had a DOOM themed Parentheses Fuzz, but it’s just such a perfect description of what this pedal does! Plus it was fun to draw

This pedal is so fun and sludgy. It basically writes the riffs for you.

I didn’t have too much trouble with the build aside from rushing the final wiring and making a couple minor mistakes. This is good because there are a lot of posts about how this pedal has the most troubleshooting posts and I didn’t want to be the latest noob to have an issue with it

LM308 and germanium diodes from Jameco, transistors from Amplified Parts, rest from Tayda. I’m glad I didn’t try using screw in type LED bezels for this because I think the process of trying to line up the legs of 3 LEDs with 5 knobs and a rotary switch would have been “souls-like”, meaning extreme tedious and frustrating.

The print is much darker that what I designed so I’m thinking I need to aim brighter over all when sending the pdf to Tayda. I also thought the glossy knobs would be more fitting for this pedal if they were matte, so I found a tutorial where you use a magic eraser to scrub plastic and make it matte, and it looks great!

 

[dawson]

Great illustration!
I'm super curious about your drawing method- do you start analogue with pencil/pen, or do you use a device to draw directly into the software?

*Awesome snail also

 

[KR Sound]

Bad. Ass.

 

[SlowAudio]

Great illustration!
I'm super curious about your drawing method- do you start analogue with pencil/pen, or do you use a device to draw directly into the software?

*Awesome snail also

Thanks! Sure I'll tell you about it. In this case I drew on a piece of paper with light blue lines as a guide. Essentially like comic book production. I used a blue lead mechanical pencil, brush pens, and white gel pens until I got it close. I scanned the drawing at a high resolution, 6 or 8 hundred dpi. The D was too small and the word didn't look balanced, so I fixed it in photoshop. I did all the colors in PS and the smoke because it was a little easier to iterate on, and I wasn't sure if I was going to have the smoke or not. I tried exporting the final art and directly and image tracing in Illustrator, but there was weird anti-alias shapes, especially on the edges of the smoke, that didn't look good. It also had far too many points and crashed illustrator several times. This whole thing was a lot for Illustrator in general. Because the trace didn't work out, I exported every layer of color as black, and image traced them individually. Kinda like making stencils for a screenprint. Then I assembled them all in the right order and placement and replaced the colors.

 

[steviejr92]

Incredible build!

 

[dawson]

Thanks! Sure I'll tell you about it. In this case I drew on a piece of paper with light blue lines as a guide. Essentially like comic book production. I used a blue lead mechanical pencil, brush pens, and white gel pens until I got it close. I scanned the drawing at a high resolution, 6 or 8 hundred dpi. The D was too small and the word didn't look balanced, so I fixed it in photoshop. I did all the colors in PS and the smoke because it was a little easier to iterate on, and I wasn't sure if I was going to have the smoke or not. I tried exporting the final art and directly and image tracing in Illustrator, but there was weird anti-alias shapes, especially on the edges of the smoke, that didn't look good. It also had far too many points and crashed illustrator several times. This whole thing was a lot for Illustrator in general. Because the trace didn't work out, I exported every layer of color as black, and image traced them individually. Kinda like making stencils for a screenprint. Then I assembled them all in the right order and placement and replaced the colors.

Thanks for taking the time to walk me through that!
My Adobe Kung-Fu is in desperate need of modernization and reading through your process will help me know what to look into.

*Computers aside- freakin' awesome stippling and shading technique also!

 

[SlowAudio]

Thanks for taking the time to walk me through that!
My Adobe Kung-Fu is in desperate need of modernization and reading through your process will help me know what to look into.

*Computers aside- freakin' awesome stippling and shading technique also!

Thanks again! If you need any help send me a message. I don't use Adobe products as much as I used (mostly Figma now) to but I still get around just fine.

 

[sixxtus]

Awesome build and graphics !
Thanks for the drawing method too, very interesting, but it must be time consuming !

 

[Harry Klippton]

Oh damn that looks tight. Glad I opened this thread