For those who have built Moonn pedals and Dromtydning/Space is Fun

[comradehoser]

...or own the DBA pedals, two questions:

1. Why do Moon pedals have board ins on the right and outs on the left when looking at the printed side of the PCB contrary to where the corresponding jacks lay in American practice? This requires me to cross the input/output wires when setting up the 3PDT. Do Germans do pedals differently? Am I doing something incorrectly, like I should be soldering on the printed side?

and

2. The fuzz I can get on both the Dromtydning and the Space is Fun pedals I can only describe as anemic at best. I don't know if that's right even with gain as maxed as I can get, because I would expect a DBA pedal with fuzz to be hairy AF. (The Dromtydning fuzz cancel switch also seems pretty disappointing as it basically drops the signal almost completely out--although maybe if I had a robust fuzz I would care more). Just wondering if this mild fuzz is just the way the OG pedal is, or if I need to go wading in with audio probe to figure stuff out.

I had contacted Nils regarding the Space is fun, and he suggested swapping the gain pot.

 

[szukalski]

Yeah, the fuzz is not a feature I use on mine. Same with the fuzz cut, I just set and forget.

I never noticed the board outputs, interesting catch. We don’t do things differently here they line up with the Moonn breakouts. At the end of the day, you can wire up your 3PDT however you want..

 

[Fama]

Did you manage to fix the Dromtydning fuzz cancel switch? If there's a big volume drop I might just skip it or make it internal.

How did you find the builds otherwise?

I'm thinking of eventually building both of them, although I think I might just order the kits from Musikding, measure the PCB's and then order enclosures from Tayda based on the measurements.

 

[jesuscrisp]

1. Moonn just builds PCBs that way for no reason really.

2. Don't see those features as fully integrated fuzz pedals, but a way to dirty up the respective effects. DBA effects aren't only weird, they are also often suboptimally engineered.

EDIT: just look at the "fuzz" control in the echo dream and reverberation machine. It's an op amp gain stage without any diodes right before the output. All you'd get is some op amp breakup and otherwise massive volume boost.

 

[szukalski]

I always found the fuzz to be horrible, so I just use it to achieve unity gain.

The fuzz cancel switch has that volume drop, and I’ve seen people try to fix it with the end result being that is not worth it.

In all, the builds from Moonn are enjoyable. Nils tends to focus on the weirder stuff, and his build docs are amusingly eclectic. I’m glad to see he’s back in the game after taking a break.

 

[jesuscrisp]

The fuzz cancel switch has that volume drop, and I’ve seen people try to fix it with the end result being that is not worth it.

It's literally just a high gain "clean boost" circuit pretty much directly before the volume knob. If you wanted to make it "fuzz" without adding a ton of volume you'd need a better approach to create "fuzz" altogether.

 

[comradehoser]

Sorry folks, just got married, so I was not checking pedal discussion stuff.

The fuzz cancel switch on the Dromtydning is not really worth it, as you have to reach down and crank up the volume. Unless you really, really want to make sure you don't have fuzz. But there is nothing really to be gained (hahah) from having it there, you can just turn your fuzz knob down, same basic result.

In my opinion, between the Space is Fun and the Dromtydning, the latter has the better and more useable fuzz. They are both pretty fun pedals, but the Dromtydning I especially like. The modulations are nifty.

The feedback switch: definitely worth it.

I would agree with Szukalski's evaluation 100%: Nils' stuff generally skews experimental, usually has an economical/simple number of components, so they are generally easy to build and fun to mess about with. Other than space is fun and dromtydning, I have built aglio e olio (a great fuzz!) and bagheera (odd octavey sitarish fuzz--pretty cool), and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, a pretty craptastic Sitar emulator that I would be interested in trying to improve if anyone has any recommendations.

Have Wave Cannon, Devastator, Brownie, Wall-E, and 200 Sunny Sunns on deck.

He seems like a good dude, if a little disorganized. I do tend to support the idiosyncratic.

 

[comradehoser]

just look at the "fuzz" control in the echo dream and reverberation machine. It's an op amp gain stage without any diodes right before the output. All you'd get is some op amp breakup and otherwise massive volume boost.

maybe DBA is conceiving of their "fuzz" as a tube pusher?

 

[Fama]

I would agree with Szukalski's evaluation 100%: Nils' stuff generally skews experimental, usually has an economical/simple number of components, so they are generally easy to build and fun to mess about with. Other than space is fun and dromtydning, I have built aglio e olio (a great fuzz!) and bagheera (odd octavey sitarish fuzz--pretty cool), and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, a pretty craptastic Sitar emulator that I would be interested in trying to improve if anyone has any recommendations.

FWIW I built the 5 knob version of Acapulco (Aztec Sunn), and I'm not quite sure if the EQ is worth it. But the pedal looks really cool so it's fine.

 

[DGWVI]

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, a pretty craptastic Sitar emulator that I would be interested in trying to improve if anyone has any recommendations.

I have one of these on my bench currently. So far the only mods I've done is removed the diode to ground, I used Schottkies in place of the germaniums, and replaced the output cap with a 1u.
With so few parts, there's not a whole lot to mod, but running a higher gain unit before it can wield some nifty octave up tones. Having an envelope filter before and/ or after it is also fun.

My plan is to throw it in a box with a Bronx Cheer, thanks to @Feral Feline's suggestion


I still need to work up my Dromtydning / Space is Fun 2-in-1

 

[jesuscrisp]

FWIW I built the 5 knob version of Acapulco (Aztec Sunn), and I'm not quite sure if the EQ is worth it. But the pedal looks really cool so it's fine.

Tbf I'm pretty sure the EQ would sound better if the volume pot was switched to 500K, amp tonestack going into anything smaller results in a huge emphasis on treble and big loss of bass.

Otherwise it's the typical Marshall-style EQ stack, so you can calculate the response using Duncan's tonestack calculator.

 

[Feral Feline]

Congratulations, @comradehoser !

 

[Fama]

Tbf I'm pretty sure the EQ would sound better if the volume pot was switched to 500K, amp tonestack going into anything smaller results in a huge emphasis on treble and big loss of bass.

Otherwise it's the typical Marshall-style EQ stack, so you can calculate the response using Duncan's tonestack calculator.

I actually read that same comment on another thread (probably by you?), and I used a 1M pot since I had one extra pot which was unaccounted for. Don't get me wrong, it works better than with the 100k pot I think - with that I pretty much only found usable tones with treble at 0 and bass at around max. Now there's more leeway, but the EQ stack still seems to act very weirdly. If I don't keep bass and mids over halfway it starts to sound a bit like the Ibanez Standard Fuzz clone or the Joyo Voodoo Octave on the scooped setting. So basically I have to keep those high up and carefully try to balance them around if I want to try messing with the EQ settings. It doesn't feel intuitive or logical - or at least in the sense of "getting good tones out of different positions", it's more "find the position that sounds decent".

 

[neiltheseal]

EDIT: just look at the "fuzz" control in the echo dream and reverberation machine. It's an op amp gain stage without any diodes right before the output. All you'd get is some op amp breakup and otherwise massive volume boost.

Does this mean that adding a couple of diodes could improve the fuzz on these?

I love the echo dream but the fuzz sucks. I’d love to improve it somehow

 

[comradehoser]

Well, since we are chatting Moonn again, here is a bonus report on the other Moonn boards I built:

Devastator: pretty decent fuzz: can find "neat noises" veering into experimental. Didn't find it as brutally deconstructive as the name would imply.

Wall-E: Bitcrusher that crushes your bits. It crushes your signal in a given pattern (selection of 4). Fun to build and try, but not something I come back to regularly. Kind of how I feel about the PPCB HAARP/Arpanoid--this pedal is like that through a defective vocoder.

200 Sunny Sunns: decent little preamp/overdrive--it's pretty much what you would expect from a Sunn amp clone.

I lost Wave Cannon in my bench somewhere, and haven't yet built the tiny Brownie in favor of finishing some bigger/more complex projects.

 

[comradehoser]

Have to rectify my opinion on the 200 sunny sunns. Tried it initially on guitar and it was very hifi but with a somewhat unpleasant tonal quality in the mids. It was like too much. It just sat in my box for a long time until I recently decided to see if I could make something go with it.

On bass, (it's a bass preamp, I forgot that) it is really really good. Adds some very tasty dynamics. On bass eating the thorpy fallout cloud, it is MASSIVE subsonic doom city. It doesn't always make things sound amazing, it does make a lot of things sound way gooder than they would on their own, though. When I switch it off, things just sound kind of dull and flat.

Now hopefully I can fix this background whine with the trimmers