SOLVED Paragon mystery issues

[giovanni]

I was very very excited to finish the Paragon since I heard very good things about it and every time is featured on TPS I find it really sweet sounding. To my disappointment, my build did not work at all.

Mods: I opted for channel 1 (right side looking at the pedal panel, red LED) high gain, channel 2 low gain. I omitted the charge pump and shorted the appropriate diode pins. I used 1N4148 and 1N914 instead of MA856 and 1S1588, respectively.

Here are the symptoms:
1. the right side (red) doesn't work at all, the pedal produces no sound if I engage it
2. the tone control on the left side works as a volume control - if it's all the way to zero, the sound disappears
3. the dip switches don't seem to affect the sound
4. if dip switch 2 is on (up) the left side becomes completely mute as well (which is weird because my assumption was that dip 2 corresponds to the other channel hard clipping)

All of the above make me conclude that I have some short somewhere, or maybe a bad IC or bad diodes or a combination of all of the above. I am at a loss. Before I start audio probing, I was hoping some eagle-eyed folks out here could point to the obvious flaw in my soldering or components.




I'll appreciate any help!

 

[MichaelW]

OK so I figured out why the tone knob was acting like volume: one of the legs was shorting against the LED bezel when tight in the enclosure. I also realized that the dip switch works perfectly fine, I just wasn’t able to take the time to carefully listen to the differences in sound, which are quite subtle in my opinion. I want to really make sure everything works correctly by rocking out a bit when I have a bit of time and then I’m gonna mark this as solved (yes, I’m superstitious!).

Thanks all for the help!

Yah for sure, the bezel choices are limited if you're using the provided drill pattern, anything 5mm is going to be problematic with the tone pot legs. On one of the ones I built I ran into that and wound up using heat shrink tubing to insulate the pot leg.

If you crank the gain all the way up you should be able to hear the differences with the clipping positions. At lower gain levels it's much more subtle. In the "Distortion" setting you should hear a drop in volume.

 

[Big Monk]

I also realized that the dip switch works perfectly fine, I just wasn’t able to take the time to carefully listen to the differences in sound, which are quite subtle in my opinion.

After having played the Paragon Mini for some time now, I realize I only play the overdrive mode on both sides.

One of my pet projects right now on the breadboard is a circuit I’m calling “The Steel Driver”, which is basically an overdrive only blues breaker with various circuit tweaks. If it works out well, I may do a double overdrive similar to the PM and rock that.

Glad you got things worked out!

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

Thanks for the warning about the LED bezel. I had that problem crop up in another build. I'll probably go with 3mm LEDs & no bezel when I build mine.

 

[giovanni]

I finally fixed this for good (fingers crossed). At first I tried shielding the tone pots with electrical tape but obviously that didn’t work as soon as all the pots and switches were tightened. So I decided to go nuclear and replaced the LED bezels with plastic ones I got from Tayda. They don’t look as nice but they do the job and are a permanent fix for the shorting issue. Now I can finally move on to the next build (build report will be coming up).