mybud
Well-known member
- Build Rating
To try to arrive at a more or less complete inventory of our esteemed constituent's boost offerings, I ordered this little beauty, completely forgetting that I already had built the Tayda equivalents a long while ago. This was before I had grasped exactly what an EP booster might be (that is, based on the Echoplex preamp, and so on). This one offers more options than the Tayda PCB, with four toggles in a row, so demanding fairly painstaking measuring to fit these all in.
I blame my sloppy drilling on doing this at the end of a hectic and exhausting week, when I could have taken my time and done it later when less tired. A good lesson in there for yours truly, since the drilling was sufficiently off to entail removing the volume pot and one of the toggles and hand wiring the lot to get it housed and working. So what started out as a painless build turned into a real challenge when it came to housing it.
You'll notice that the row of toggles is off by a millimetre or two in places (nobody's fault but mine, naturally). I also experienced issues with the 3PDT toggle, where the bare wire connector seemed to glance against the middle row of lugs. This was really bizarre because the pedal worked when activated but not in bypass, symptoms I've never experienced before.
On that note, I socketed the JFET, which connected erratically on startup and had to be soldered in place for the pedal to function correctly. So again, a fair amount of troubleshooting and finessing to get this up and running but all's well in the long run.
It's more versatile TMM than the Clandestine, but in a similar ball park, sound-wise. Switching from 18V to 9V produces an eerie silent moment, while the JFET recalibrates itself, so most likely I'll keep it at 18V for the most part. It certainly adds something to the sound (hard to put into words, but a kind of 'warm halo' in each setting). The name obscurely puns on Hieronymus Bosch, for no clear reason I can think of.
Thanks for reading and wishing you all 'well-behaved' and successful builds.
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