rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This is a report on my build of the Catalinbred Naga Viper, or Dragon's Breath Boost. As with the Acapulco Gold I posted recently, this was one of my very first builds. It was on some lists of people's favorites and it's an incredibly simple circuit.
Inspiration
I went off the original Naga Viper name, and decided that a Snake Eagle would be a good reference I kinda like "predators" of the original pedal's namesake (e.g. a Harrier for a RAT). Snake Eagles are a genus of African birds that are known for preying on snakes, including Vipers.
I think that's pretty cool. I have seen a bird eating a snake before - a red-tailed hawk eating what was probably a garter snake or similar here in the PNW. It was sitting in a tree and to be honest I think it didn't know what to do with it. My gf and I spent a while watching it - because how often do you see birds eating snakes - and it couldn't even kill the snake. While the hawk might have been embarrassed, I felt worse for the snake.
Now, the original image in my head was of the Mexican flag, which features an eagle eating a snake. Unfortunately, snake eagles don't live in Mexico. The flag actually features a Golden Eagle. But I do have a golden eagle pedal coming up so I didn't want to use that. I still decided to stick with an Aztec/Maya sort of theme in the background and for the text.
I iterated on the design a lot. It was really hard to get the exact background I wanted. I started with a sand-colored background, played withdifferent amounts of opacity, different levels of detail for the eagle, and so on. I think I sat on the design for probably 5 months.
The enclosure paint is Tayda's glimmer brown sugar, a really nice refined metallic color. And I went with silver knobs. I'm really happy with how the design and aesthetic came together for this one.
The Build
This was in my first batch of pedals. I liked it, but it wasn't the most sexy sounding pedal, so I built it and it sat in my storage boxes for a long time. As I was going through circuits I wanted to revisit and rehouse, I decided to pick this up again, and designed the new enclosure. You can see a mix of old and new assembly choices: the wiring is pretty rough, it uses the PCB daughterboard rather than my own, it uses janky amazon audio sockets, it uses janky resistors and caps. Actually, looking at the photo of the guts, I think I might have the wrong component in the 3N3 cap footprint, since it's ceramic. I should open it up and fix that. Meanwhile, when I rehoused the board, I redid the LED wiring to avoid shorting against the enclosure and replaced the power jack with an outtie jack.
The Pedal
I really like it (though as I mentioned, I think I do have a component wrong, so take this review with a grain of salt)! I think this could really be an always-on pedal. I haven't built a rangemaster and maybe only one other treble boost, so I don't have a lot to compare it to there. But it really does thicken the high range. Besides a muff I find that with most pedals, the B and E strings above the 12th fret often sound pretty weak and don't have much sustain... but not with this on. Another benefit is that I think at the end of the signal chain, this doesn't really change the tone of fuzzes or overdrives running through it. That's pretty nice, usually I find the "voice" of the last gain pedal in the chain is the dominant one. It sounds great with a KoT or a Hudson Broadcast.
It can get a tiny bit icepicky with some of the settings turned up, but it's not bad. In terms of the controls, I'm not quite sure what the range does. The heat is pretty obvious as a drive knob. The boost can be pretty intense.
I think if I dropped the boost and range knobs, setting boost for unity and range in the middle of the sweep, I'd be able to incorporate this into some custom PCB layouts with other circuits. I'd just keep the heat knob.
Ratings
Inspiration
I went off the original Naga Viper name, and decided that a Snake Eagle would be a good reference I kinda like "predators" of the original pedal's namesake (e.g. a Harrier for a RAT). Snake Eagles are a genus of African birds that are known for preying on snakes, including Vipers.
I think that's pretty cool. I have seen a bird eating a snake before - a red-tailed hawk eating what was probably a garter snake or similar here in the PNW. It was sitting in a tree and to be honest I think it didn't know what to do with it. My gf and I spent a while watching it - because how often do you see birds eating snakes - and it couldn't even kill the snake. While the hawk might have been embarrassed, I felt worse for the snake.
Now, the original image in my head was of the Mexican flag, which features an eagle eating a snake. Unfortunately, snake eagles don't live in Mexico. The flag actually features a Golden Eagle. But I do have a golden eagle pedal coming up so I didn't want to use that. I still decided to stick with an Aztec/Maya sort of theme in the background and for the text.
I iterated on the design a lot. It was really hard to get the exact background I wanted. I started with a sand-colored background, played withdifferent amounts of opacity, different levels of detail for the eagle, and so on. I think I sat on the design for probably 5 months.
The enclosure paint is Tayda's glimmer brown sugar, a really nice refined metallic color. And I went with silver knobs. I'm really happy with how the design and aesthetic came together for this one.
The Build
This was in my first batch of pedals. I liked it, but it wasn't the most sexy sounding pedal, so I built it and it sat in my storage boxes for a long time. As I was going through circuits I wanted to revisit and rehouse, I decided to pick this up again, and designed the new enclosure. You can see a mix of old and new assembly choices: the wiring is pretty rough, it uses the PCB daughterboard rather than my own, it uses janky amazon audio sockets, it uses janky resistors and caps. Actually, looking at the photo of the guts, I think I might have the wrong component in the 3N3 cap footprint, since it's ceramic. I should open it up and fix that. Meanwhile, when I rehoused the board, I redid the LED wiring to avoid shorting against the enclosure and replaced the power jack with an outtie jack.
The Pedal
I really like it (though as I mentioned, I think I do have a component wrong, so take this review with a grain of salt)! I think this could really be an always-on pedal. I haven't built a rangemaster and maybe only one other treble boost, so I don't have a lot to compare it to there. But it really does thicken the high range. Besides a muff I find that with most pedals, the B and E strings above the 12th fret often sound pretty weak and don't have much sustain... but not with this on. Another benefit is that I think at the end of the signal chain, this doesn't really change the tone of fuzzes or overdrives running through it. That's pretty nice, usually I find the "voice" of the last gain pedal in the chain is the dominant one. It sounds great with a KoT or a Hudson Broadcast.
It can get a tiny bit icepicky with some of the settings turned up, but it's not bad. In terms of the controls, I'm not quite sure what the range does. The heat is pretty obvious as a drive knob. The boost can be pretty intense.
I think if I dropped the boost and range knobs, setting boost for unity and range in the middle of the sweep, I'd be able to incorporate this into some custom PCB layouts with other circuits. I'd just keep the heat knob.
Ratings
- Build: 5/5
- Pedal: 5/5
