Fingolfen
Well-known member
- Build Rating
For my Black Ash clone I'd considered using vintage bits, but none of the readily available boards would easily accommodate the vintage components, and I've found vintage bits tend to have a higher noise floor than anything modern - so I decided to stick with purely modern bits for my first time out anyway...
I absent mindedly forgot to take a close-up of the board itself before I put it into the enclosure, so the picture above will have to do for now. I'm using the South Obolon FX Black Bender board, in black of course! My PCB choice also sort of dictated the use of more modern components, as there really isn't room for the 1/2W resistors or large capacitors to be easily incorporated. For this build all of the resistors are 1% metal film, 1/4 Watt Yago. The film capacitors are WIMA and KEMET and the electrolytic capacitors are all Nichcon. The transistors are all 2N3903. To get the most out of the pedal, Q3 has to be biased, and there is a convenient pad where you can set the bias on the transistor.
The offboard wiring follows my usual technique with a star ground on the input. The LED is also wired offboard, so I found a convenient place to put it near the top of the enclosure. I'm using a 3PDT daughter board for the stomp switch. All of the jack connections (and the LED connections) are covered in heat shrink tubing. While there was room for a battery, I decided to not include one at this point.
The original Black Ash design was quite striking, so I had to come up with something at least equally dramatic for the "Steggo" version of the pedal - and I think I managed to do it. The sound of the pedal is really good, and really unique. I'm working through various settings to ensure it matches demos I've seen online, and so far so good. At this point it is right up there among my favorite fuzz pedals (others near the top of that list would be my Fluffy Mastodon and the Monolith), so it will likely show up on the pedal board with some frequency!
A bit more (mostly catastrophe geology) at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2022/12/cloning-rare-eqd-black-ash.html
I absent mindedly forgot to take a close-up of the board itself before I put it into the enclosure, so the picture above will have to do for now. I'm using the South Obolon FX Black Bender board, in black of course! My PCB choice also sort of dictated the use of more modern components, as there really isn't room for the 1/2W resistors or large capacitors to be easily incorporated. For this build all of the resistors are 1% metal film, 1/4 Watt Yago. The film capacitors are WIMA and KEMET and the electrolytic capacitors are all Nichcon. The transistors are all 2N3903. To get the most out of the pedal, Q3 has to be biased, and there is a convenient pad where you can set the bias on the transistor.
The offboard wiring follows my usual technique with a star ground on the input. The LED is also wired offboard, so I found a convenient place to put it near the top of the enclosure. I'm using a 3PDT daughter board for the stomp switch. All of the jack connections (and the LED connections) are covered in heat shrink tubing. While there was room for a battery, I decided to not include one at this point.
The original Black Ash design was quite striking, so I had to come up with something at least equally dramatic for the "Steggo" version of the pedal - and I think I managed to do it. The sound of the pedal is really good, and really unique. I'm working through various settings to ensure it matches demos I've seen online, and so far so good. At this point it is right up there among my favorite fuzz pedals (others near the top of that list would be my Fluffy Mastodon and the Monolith), so it will likely show up on the pedal board with some frequency!
A bit more (mostly catastrophe geology) at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2022/12/cloning-rare-eqd-black-ash.html
