EisengesisFX
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THE PEDAL
I think I first saw mention of the Clarinot in my lurking or inadvertent trawling of r/diypedals. Had never heard of it, nor Mid-Fi, ever before. Talk about love at first listen! The small part count, weirdo warble and envelope-reactive sound instantly enticed me. Unbelievable how much this circuit has its own distinct character even in the realm of tape emulation. Modern digital emulations ala the Strymon Deco are far more known and popular, but the Clarinot does so much so weirdly and without much build complexity.
THE BUILD
Once again, because this was among my first batch of PPCB boards after starting my journey with Fuzzdog stuff, and I use the latter's Simple Tester, I wasn't testing correctly and kept wondering why my populated board wouldn't even turn on. Other than that, things were pretty straightforward. Shoutout to my cousin for helping determine the user error, and to heatshrink for covering my very functional but very ugly optocoupler job.
Big ups as well to @DGWVI for answering all my mod questions. I ultimately wanted to get the Clarinot sounding as clean as possible, so I ultimately omitted the gain pot, left opamp legs 1 and 8 down, and removed R1 and C4. Per his own testing excursions, I might swap in a Moonn SHO preamp or something else to get things even cleaner. My gain needs are taken care of by other pedals.
THE THEME
I've loved Voivod since I was a teenager. They're an utterly unique band loved by folks of all musical backgrounds and their drummer has just done too much amazing art over their 40 years of existence for me not to use some on this pedal (and many to come!). There's no direct relation to the Clarinot itself, but the broadly speaking I think the quirky character of both band and circuit is complementary. Here, I cropped the cover of their 1989 masterpiece Nothingface.
Early on I realized I wanted to get snazzy with the indicator LEDs, so thanks once again to said cousin, I lowered the CLR value (it's either 1k or 2.2k), drilled the holes from my printed graphic, cut down some plastic from a Jameco organizer draw tab divider and glued it underneath before taping the LEDs underneath that. I'm incredibly stoked at the result and will be doing stuff like this plenty going forward.
As usual, I designed in Photopea, printed to transparency paper, and underpainted it with paint pens. I bit off more than I could chew; the paint of course covers the paper's underside adhesive, so you need to leave enough unpainted surface area to stick the whole thing to the enclosure. I didn't really accommodate for that on the upper part of the decal over. Had to just paint the top and bottom sides of the enclosure with the blue, then apply the respective transparency paper pieces. This reads fine from a distance, but on closer inspection is less elegant looking than an underpainted decal.
The sheer amount of paint coating the main decal meant cracks started appearing well before I applied it to the enclosure. I think I might need to be a little more calculating and less ambitious in my color ideas for the time being. I also probably did too many coats of spray enamel, so there's some lifting going on as well. So it goes.
THE SOUND
To me it's incredibly easy and frankly preferable to go well beyond tape wow/flutter emulation and into modulation sounds that are the faintest bit familiar, but thanks to the envelope aspect and depending on your settings, unpredictable and bizarre. That the PT2399 is wired to only do one repeat here is a crucial part of the masterstroke. On paper, that sounds like a limitation, but in actual practice that single repeat can sound like a trem arm pushed down forcefully or even weirder.
As I've seen plenty of others say in my internet searches, I'm also not huge on the fuzz in this circuit, but that's quite minor with how much I adore everything else!
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