mkstewartesq
Well-known member
This is my latest build. As background, I do a lot of 2-in-1s - not because I particularly love stringing two pedals together but because since I got deeply into this hobby over the past few months, I like building and my loop switcher only has 10 loops - so to have a variety of effects (and different flavors of certain effects), I’ve done a lot of 2-in-1s just to have them all on the board without taking up an extra loop unnecessarily. ANYWAY….
Other than a chorus and one of the modes of the Unison Double Tracker, I was really missing some meat and potatoes modulation effects on my board - specifically a flanger and a phaser – so I decided to do a 2-in-1 of those pedals to fill up my last slot for the time being.
Enclosure - Since the two effects I am combining are meant for a 1590BB and a 125B respectively, I went with a Tayda 1590DD. The artwork is by my daughter who is an incredible artist – while she has helped refine and improve on a lot of my other designs, this time I asked her to do something exactly the way she wanted to from scratch with no input from me. So she came up with this art she calls “Nuclear Summer”, which I assume is a play on “nuclear winter“ - but it’s bad form to ask the artist their intent so I didn’t.
Some notes on the XC Phase:
Mike
Other than a chorus and one of the modes of the Unison Double Tracker, I was really missing some meat and potatoes modulation effects on my board - specifically a flanger and a phaser – so I decided to do a 2-in-1 of those pedals to fill up my last slot for the time being.
Enclosure - Since the two effects I am combining are meant for a 1590BB and a 125B respectively, I went with a Tayda 1590DD. The artwork is by my daughter who is an incredible artist – while she has helped refine and improve on a lot of my other designs, this time I asked her to do something exactly the way she wanted to from scratch with no input from me. So she came up with this art she calls “Nuclear Summer”, which I assume is a play on “nuclear winter“ - but it’s bad form to ask the artist their intent so I didn’t.
Some notes on the XC Phase:
- I experienced a lot of the same problems that others have with this build - ticking in certain modes, difficulty dialing in phasing that worked properly in all 4 modes, etc. My specific peculiarities were: ticking in Block mode and uncorrectable distortion in 45 mode that made that mode unusable.
- I ordered matched quad 2N5952s from Banzai. While the gate voltage was in the sweet spot for phasing ( 2V-2.5 V), something just felt off. As a last ditch effort, I began to wonder if the “matched” JFETs from Banzai were not matched to phaser specs. So I asked @fig for some assistance on locating a better matched quad and he very generously sent me some that he had matched himself. As soon as I socketed them in, the distortion in 45 mode vanished and some of the general wobbliness of the phaser cycles in all modes evened out. The only thing that new set did not cure was the ticking in Block mode - but that can be biased out while still getting a respectable phase going. So @fig single-handedly saved this pedal and has my deep gratitude for getting me to a point where all four modes work. (The gate voltage on these new JFETS when phasing is actually at around 1.7 V rather than the "expected" 2V-2.5V - but others here have reported getting good phasing at around the same voltage, and they sound SO much better than the Banzai, so I'm guessing the "2V-2.5V" is not a hard-and-fast rule and other factors of which i am not smart enough to comprehend come into play.
- I don’t know if it is other peoples’ experience but, on mine, Block mode is rather hissy (this is regardless of which JFETs are used)- but Script mode is absolutely dead silent as far as background noise. May be the nature of the beast (this is Baby's First Phaser) - but all four modes have their own "flavor" and I appreciate having options.
- I’ve never owned any flavor of Electric Mistress so I’m not 100% familiar with what it “should” sound like. So I biased according to the instructions and to my own personal taste. As someone else previously noted, the Mistress is almost more a chorus than a Flanger, so I have actually biased it to sound a little more metallic to bring out the rise and fall of the flange effect.
- The only oddity is setting the clock trim pot. The build documents call for a 10 K trim pot but, on his forum, MadBean suggested a 20 K pot, so I went with that. Nonetheless, you are supposed to bias it right to the point where you start to hear chirps in the peaks of each flange. However, I, like some other people on his forum, never heard any chirps on either of the two builds I did (this one, and one for a friend) even when I maxed out the trim pot. So a different value of trim pot may ultimately be needed. I understand that the clock frequency needs to be at about 70 kHz (because I’m running at 18 V) but my frequency counter on my DMM never seemed to go above 60 kHz and I’m not even sure that I trust that reading.
- The XC Phase is 9 V but I wanted to run the MadBean at 18 V like the original Mistress. After consultation with the fine people on this forum, it was decided that using a charge pump to get both 9 V and 18 V from a single DC jack posed too much of a risk of charge pump whine, so I elected to just run separate jacks, one 18 V for the Mistress and one 9 V for the phaser.
- To hopefully minimize clock interference and other extraneous noise, I used shielded cable on the input and output and tried to keep them away from the boards. Since the cable running from the out of one 3PDT to the in of the other 3PDT would also be susceptible to picking up noise, I also used shielded cable there, and grounded the shielding for that cable on the ground lug of the 3PDT for the MadBean pedal, with some heat shrink over the shielding to avoid the tinned shielding contacting another lug and causing a short. It's not pretty but it seems to do the trick
- Though it was not my intent to actually run the effects together at the same time, they do play nice together, with one exception. When running both effects at the same time, switching to Block mode on the XC Phase causes a laser-beam-like sound to enter the signal, and it’s obviously tied to the rate knob of the Current Lover. But both Script 90 and Script 45 work just fine in conjunction with the Current Lover without any issues. I might add an order switcher just to see what unexpected complications come from running the flanger into the phaser. (It might sound great, or it might summon Beetlejuice - it’s all TBD.)
Mike
