Next is the Madbean Dreamtime. This one has been a long time coming. This is a project from 2018 that's no longer available. It's an FV-1 delay and reverb in a 1590a. The pots are on a separate board and they're stacked under the main board. Low profile electrolytics were a must, as well as a low profile dip 8 socket, which I didn't realize even existed. The low pro socket is less than half the height of a regular dip 8 socket.
Populating the board was a piece of cake, and I tested it before even having an enclosure. No big. I have soldered the surface mount components.
The drill template was frustratingly off. There was no way to make the jacks fit without touching, so I kept widening and widening, until I had a huge channel dug out that I filled with JB weld. Can't win em all I guess. Lesson learned, double check the drill specs before actually drilling.
Sound wise, this is a weird pedal. I'm not one for a lot of modulation on delays, and I'm not really into delays period. The first half or so sweep of the modulation knob gives some pretty standard modulation, after that, there's a ring mod effect on the repeats, and the last quarter turn or so, there's a fast and then a slow tremolo to the repeats. On the one hand, this creates an interesting glitchy effect, but I don't find it to be very musical I guess.
The reverb side is using one of the internal algorithms of the fv-1. There's a sort of doubling and chorusy effect that quite frankly I find irritating. I can almost dial it out but not quite.
Why did I choose this project? Great question. It's not because of the features or sounds, it wasn't the 1590a form factor. This PCB came with a surface mount practice board and I thought that was really cool. Unfortunately, I ended up doing many other surface mount projects before I ever got to this one.
This was very challenging to box. I wanted to quit several times but I persevered.
There's a quick knob turn demo below where I attempt to show what this pedal does. I'm never looking for oddball sounds and effects so this really isn't for me.