MichaelW
Well-known member
- Build Rating
Another obscure Boss project from @Guardians of the analog and @dan.schumaker doing the board layout.
Chris sent me this one a while back and I finally got around to building it.
Like most of the Boss pedals I've built, I'd had no experience with until Chris turned me onto them.
I'd never heard of the Power Driver and as I understand it, it's a pretty rare pedal. It was only in production for 11 months!
Doing some research and watching some demo vids before starting my build, I've learned that this is considered Boss's "Big Muff".
There's more Big Muff fuzz going on than an overdrive. Having said that, if you only stopped at the "Big Muff"-ness of this pedal you'd be missing out on a lot of other fairly nuanced tones available.
I like it a lot as a low gain pedal with the gain knob between 9-10 O'clock.
The EQ controls also have pretty obscure names, which is a bit our of character for Boss. There's a "Fat" control that's a low end control. And a "Muscle" control, that sounds like it tweaks the mids".
It uses crap ton of transistors, mostly BC550's. But the BOM called for 3x 2SK170's, I wound up subbing with 2SK209-GR's. (Chris tells me J201's are fine too).
This is the first time I've built a @dan.schumaker board, and I probably should have looked a little closer before pulling the parts for it.
I had picked all the resistors before realizing that the board actually uses 1/8 watt. I wasn't going to put all those resistors back, so I just built them standing up.
I had to play "Twister" with the offboard wiring to the 3PDT board but it all works.
I'm mulling over how best to demo this pedal, and when I figure that out I'll add a demo here to this thread.
I used another StompBoxParts enclosure, "Aqua Vein" color. Cool color!
Thanks Chris and Dan!!
Chris sent me this one a while back and I finally got around to building it.
Like most of the Boss pedals I've built, I'd had no experience with until Chris turned me onto them.
I'd never heard of the Power Driver and as I understand it, it's a pretty rare pedal. It was only in production for 11 months!
Doing some research and watching some demo vids before starting my build, I've learned that this is considered Boss's "Big Muff".
There's more Big Muff fuzz going on than an overdrive. Having said that, if you only stopped at the "Big Muff"-ness of this pedal you'd be missing out on a lot of other fairly nuanced tones available.
I like it a lot as a low gain pedal with the gain knob between 9-10 O'clock.
The EQ controls also have pretty obscure names, which is a bit our of character for Boss. There's a "Fat" control that's a low end control. And a "Muscle" control, that sounds like it tweaks the mids".
It uses crap ton of transistors, mostly BC550's. But the BOM called for 3x 2SK170's, I wound up subbing with 2SK209-GR's. (Chris tells me J201's are fine too).
This is the first time I've built a @dan.schumaker board, and I probably should have looked a little closer before pulling the parts for it.
I had picked all the resistors before realizing that the board actually uses 1/8 watt. I wasn't going to put all those resistors back, so I just built them standing up.
I had to play "Twister" with the offboard wiring to the 3PDT board but it all works.
I'm mulling over how best to demo this pedal, and when I figure that out I'll add a demo here to this thread.
I used another StompBoxParts enclosure, "Aqua Vein" color. Cool color!
Thanks Chris and Dan!!
