My Procrastinator is distorted

[johnk_10]

I just finished carefully building a Procrastinator using every component required for the pcb. I got it to work but it's very distorted. I've built over 1000 pedals successfully over the last 20 years including my own etched pcb versions and even a veroboard version about 10 years ago of a slow gear and all of them worked perfectly, and while the procrastinator does swell and decay, i can't seem to get it to sound perfectly clean.
any ideas?

here's a couple pics of my build:

 

[johnk_10]

it mostly has a faint distortion on the decay of the signal. has anyone else noticed this?

 

[Nic]

Is your power + soldered to both the + and ground pad ?

 

[Erik S]

Is this diode backwards?

 

[jcpst]

I can get my procrastinator to distort a bit if I play hard enough. I never noticed it before because I’m always playing in the dynamic range that triggers the swell.

 

[Guilherme Collateral]

Is this diode backwards?

View attachment 90531

Yes it is

 

[johnk_10]

Is this diode backwards?

View attachment 90531

wow. good eye! thanks, i'll have to correct that!

 

[johnk_10]

Is this diode backwards?

View attachment 90531

thanks Eric S! i reverse it and it's 100X better now. i feel like a moron doing that.

 

[Nostradoomus]

even the greats have an off day, nice you see you around here john

 

[Feral Feline]

By GODOT, he's human after all!



I find it's almost instinct to stick two diodes next to each other in an anti-parallel configuration. There's a few PPCB boards that have all the diodes oriented in the same direction — I found it's pretty easy to trip over them, when that instinct kicks in. Yet, here there's a diode pointing south just on the other side of that resistor.

Glad it was a quick easy fix.

 

[johnk_10]

By GODOT, he's human after all!



I find it's almost instinct to stick two diodes next to each other in an anti-parallel configuration. There's a few PPCB boards that have all the diodes oriented in the same direction — I found it's pretty easy to trip over them, when that instinct kicks in. Yet, here there's a diode pointing south just on the other side of that resistor.

Glad it was a quick easy fix.

me too. maybe it was because that i completed the PCB at 4:00 am, but there's really no excuse for that.

 

[Feral Feline]

Man, that's when I'm most active, @ 4am, sleep deprived and blundering about, but most active!
Can relate to that, even if my builds don't come anywhere close to yours on any level.

 

[pricklyrobot]

I usually have problems with my distorters being procrastinated…

On a more slightly on-topic note, I built a Slow Gear clone several years ago. It was one of two boards ever where I etched my own PCB. And that’s how I learned that was one step farther (specifically the drilling of the billions of tiny holes) into DIY than I wanted to go!

 

[JTEX]

I was going to jump in and offer some hopefully helpful advice but procrastination got the better of me. Glad to be here just in time to see that the problem is solved. Don't you just love it when that happens?