Learning everything all over again with the Tri-Vibe

mkstewartesq

Well-known member
So it’s been close to a year since I built my last pedal (although I still check in on this forum daily). The reasons for taking time off or multiple. First, I had built about 45 pedals in the span of two years, many of them just different flavors of the same effect, and felt that I had pretty much filled out the bench as far as my pedalboard - there were no gaping sonic holes that needed to be filled urgently and I just really didn’t see anything but I absolutely felt I had to build right away. Second, I decided I really should focus on actually playing the guitar that I used with the pedals rather than constantly jumping to my next pedal build (ha, that didn’t happen so much – life gets in the way).

ANYWAY - I’ve never had a true vibe pedal (spoiler alert: still don’t). Both my Karaoke Chorus and Circulator have “vibe mode” but I don’t love either of them, and my very last build before taking a break was GuitarPCB’s The Vibe which was really much more a phaser and rather disappointing. So to ease back into things, I wanted a project where I already had all of the components on hand. I ran across the Tagboardeffects stripboard layout of the Runoffgroove Tri-Vibe and decided to give it a shot. I was really rusty with building (and was never particularly great with stripboard) but I think it turned out reasonably well.

The build: boy was I out of practice and had forgotten almost everything, from technique to wiring. The board is really almost too big for a 125B; I should’ve used a 1590BB but I am a glutton for punishment. The thing is just absolutely jam-packed with wires and the board runs all the way from the 3PDT up past the jacks – it took me forever just to get the jacks arranged where the cable wasn’t shorting out on the board when I plugged it in. I know it is a super-messy build but let’s be kind and chalk that up to me being out of the game for a while and not just being sloppy AF.

It’s built stock except for
  • Two changes to make the layout more closely follow the original Runoffgroove schematic (changed the 1u cap on pin 9 of the LM13700 to 220nf, and changed one of the film caps to electrolytic);
  • Took a feed from pin 8 of the TL064 to create a rate LED; and
  • Added a switch to choose between a red LED and three 1N4148s in series (the original schematic calls for a 3 mm red LED but suggests that you can replace with the three 1N4148s - I couldn’t tell a difference between those two in my build but I did notice a difference on certain settings when I used a 5 mm LED, so my switch switches between the 5 mm LED and the three 1N4148s just for when the mood strikes).
The sound: the Tri-Vibe has three modes - a sort of faux-rotary speaker thing, a vibe, and a phaser. All three are musical but each is most useful at a different rate setting – I prefer the rotary and phaser sounds on a slower rate setting, while the vibe mode doesn’t really do the “pitch vibe” thing until you really crank the rate up (which I understand is also the case with some Uni-vibe circuits). All in all, it’s impressive what Runoffgroove was able to achieve without using a lamp, LDRs, or matched transistors as you would expect in an optical vibe or phaser. It’s a fun effect and very musical, although I think that, to really quell my vibe jones once and for all I’m just gonna have to break down and build a true optical vibe, either PedalPCB or Aion’s Straylight.

Enclosure: bare aluminum, polished with sandpaper and then a film-free decal applied. For the record “Revolver” is a pun on the rotary speaker and other swirly effects this thing puts out, not a reference to a gun. (It’s also the only word I could find that looked symmetrical when curving the font to fit the design.) Just wanted to make that clear since everyone I showed the pedal to “in real life“ saw the word “revolver“ and asked me if I was having suicidal thoughts or something.

Mike

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GREAT build and report.

The name is almost a palindrome, if you're slightly lysdexic — "REVLOVER".
:LOL: Tell me about it! With film free decals, you have to remember to print the image on the decal in a mirror image (backwards). Usually with an asymmetric image, it’s easy to tell when I open up the little print dialogue if I’m doing it correctly. For this one, because the image basically looked exactly the same backward and forward, I actually had to pull out a magnifying glass and put it up to the computer screen to make sure that it was actually set to print properly - and yep, the only way I could tell was that it said REVLOVER Instead of REVOLVER. :D
 
You gotta do one of the many vibes out there to get close to the real thing. I remember thinking the Tri-Vibe and Madbean Function-FX Duo-Vibe were cool in their own right but not a vibe.
 
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