WheatAndBarley
Well-known member
Full build album, be sure to click through to see it in action!
So I've had this idea for almost a year now. I bought the PCB when it was first dropped last fall but I waited awhile before boxing. I put it together back in March just to hear how it sounded (very good) but then when I got back into the print studio I got to realize my vision. I had always wanted to try screenprinting a pedal with glow in the dark ink and have it light up with a UV LED, figured the rate LED on the Caesar would be cool. Had to do some mad science mounting the LED to shine sideways instead of straight up. Not 100% happy with how it turned out but it's pretty good for a first pass. I think if I were to do it again I'd maybe try mounting a few to get a wider angle on it since the LED is missing a bunch of the image. The ink itself is standard screenprinting ink but it's glow in the dark and it's a fair bit thinner than the other stuff I was using, so after doing a few passes on the enclosure it got real splotchy. I'm kinda ok with it but I do wish I'd gotten it as clean as the other one I printed which you can check out here:
As for the Julia itself, I gotta say it’s pretty great imo, I get the popularity of this one. As a chorus running in mono it sounds very close to the sound of my 80s Ibanez CS9 which I typically use as the baseline standard for good chorus sounds. This makes sense since I the Julia is essentially a modified CE-2 and the CS9 is essentially a CE-2 with more depth and a slightly different EQ profile. The interesting thing is that the Julia has a larger range of possible settings and not just because it has more knobs. The full sweep of the rate knob on my CS9 is only about 50% of the range of the rate knob on the Julia, so it can go quite a bit faster. I’ve really noticed that despite the wideness of the range of controls, I have a hard time finding a setting that is legitimately bad. Even if you max out the rate and lag you can use the depth or blend to dial it back into something more palatable. I’ve never actually owned a vibrato pedal before either other than having a vibrato mode in previous multi-effects and I dunno why I slept on it so long. In fact, my surprise at how much I like this pedal has me seriously checking out the Julianna since it’s stereo and has that random waveform option. If the julia was stereo it would be a slam dunk choice, since I’m not sure I can give up stereo chorus after being introduced to it through the iridium. But if I was making a board for gigs or a tour or something and was only going to be playing mono, I’d probably put this on the board instead of the CS9 which is pretty huge for me.
So I've had this idea for almost a year now. I bought the PCB when it was first dropped last fall but I waited awhile before boxing. I put it together back in March just to hear how it sounded (very good) but then when I got back into the print studio I got to realize my vision. I had always wanted to try screenprinting a pedal with glow in the dark ink and have it light up with a UV LED, figured the rate LED on the Caesar would be cool. Had to do some mad science mounting the LED to shine sideways instead of straight up. Not 100% happy with how it turned out but it's pretty good for a first pass. I think if I were to do it again I'd maybe try mounting a few to get a wider angle on it since the LED is missing a bunch of the image. The ink itself is standard screenprinting ink but it's glow in the dark and it's a fair bit thinner than the other stuff I was using, so after doing a few passes on the enclosure it got real splotchy. I'm kinda ok with it but I do wish I'd gotten it as clean as the other one I printed which you can check out here:
As for the Julia itself, I gotta say it’s pretty great imo, I get the popularity of this one. As a chorus running in mono it sounds very close to the sound of my 80s Ibanez CS9 which I typically use as the baseline standard for good chorus sounds. This makes sense since I the Julia is essentially a modified CE-2 and the CS9 is essentially a CE-2 with more depth and a slightly different EQ profile. The interesting thing is that the Julia has a larger range of possible settings and not just because it has more knobs. The full sweep of the rate knob on my CS9 is only about 50% of the range of the rate knob on the Julia, so it can go quite a bit faster. I’ve really noticed that despite the wideness of the range of controls, I have a hard time finding a setting that is legitimately bad. Even if you max out the rate and lag you can use the depth or blend to dial it back into something more palatable. I’ve never actually owned a vibrato pedal before either other than having a vibrato mode in previous multi-effects and I dunno why I slept on it so long. In fact, my surprise at how much I like this pedal has me seriously checking out the Julianna since it’s stereo and has that random waveform option. If the julia was stereo it would be a slam dunk choice, since I’m not sure I can give up stereo chorus after being introduced to it through the iridium. But if I was making a board for gigs or a tour or something and was only going to be playing mono, I’d probably put this on the board instead of the CS9 which is pretty huge for me.
