falco_femoralis
Well-known member
Here is a Paragon I built with some Court Jester mods. I built a bone stock Paragon a while ago but I wasn't happy with its tone, sounding too thin, so I wanted to address that this time. If you're not familiar with the Court Jester, here is the original post.
I performed the guide's component substitutions to achieve a warmer tone, including value changes in some capacitors, using carbon composite resistors in some places instead of metal film. I also omitted the charge pump so the pedal would run at 9v just like the original. Lastly, instead of the internal dip switch to select diode types, I used an external on-off-on switch for each channel to enable selections from the face of the pedal, like on the Pauper. Both sides are high gain so that there is more range in the gain control than the original.
I didn't build the pedal with the same adjustability of the Court Jester. I wanted to include what I believe are the important alterations, to keep the pedal simple and reduce option paralysis.
Here you can see the lack of charge pump and associated diodes and capacitors, as well as the carbon resistors. You can also see a couple of resistors have small value caps in parallel.
Here is the front. I used short bat toggle switches so they won't interfere with the footswitches (feetsweetch?) I love these trim nuts, but I have no idea what size wrench to use for them. My 8mm is too small and a 9mm is too loose. I can't imagine they are SAE but you never know.
The left channel is blue rather than yellow. This fit better with the color scheme
Here is a profile of the toggle switches
And with both channels on the indicator is purple to match the color scheme
I have to be honest, at first I was disappointed with the pedal. I built a bone stock Bluesbreaker and prefer that for the light overdrive and EQ it does for my Stratocaster. But once I dialed this one in I came to like it. It does a great job of saturating your tone without becoming muddy. You can set the gain pretty high and leave the toggle switch in the middle position (no diodes engaged) and the pedal saturates nicely while cleaning up when you roll back the guitar's volume control. My favorite setting is to run the first channel as a "clean" channel into the second, which is set up with the soft clipping diodes (overdrive) to get two different kinds of gain staging.
I performed the guide's component substitutions to achieve a warmer tone, including value changes in some capacitors, using carbon composite resistors in some places instead of metal film. I also omitted the charge pump so the pedal would run at 9v just like the original. Lastly, instead of the internal dip switch to select diode types, I used an external on-off-on switch for each channel to enable selections from the face of the pedal, like on the Pauper. Both sides are high gain so that there is more range in the gain control than the original.
I didn't build the pedal with the same adjustability of the Court Jester. I wanted to include what I believe are the important alterations, to keep the pedal simple and reduce option paralysis.
Here you can see the lack of charge pump and associated diodes and capacitors, as well as the carbon resistors. You can also see a couple of resistors have small value caps in parallel.
Here is the front. I used short bat toggle switches so they won't interfere with the footswitches (feetsweetch?) I love these trim nuts, but I have no idea what size wrench to use for them. My 8mm is too small and a 9mm is too loose. I can't imagine they are SAE but you never know.
The left channel is blue rather than yellow. This fit better with the color scheme
Here is a profile of the toggle switches
And with both channels on the indicator is purple to match the color scheme
I have to be honest, at first I was disappointed with the pedal. I built a bone stock Bluesbreaker and prefer that for the light overdrive and EQ it does for my Stratocaster. But once I dialed this one in I came to like it. It does a great job of saturating your tone without becoming muddy. You can set the gain pretty high and leave the toggle switch in the middle position (no diodes engaged) and the pedal saturates nicely while cleaning up when you roll back the guitar's volume control. My favorite setting is to run the first channel as a "clean" channel into the second, which is set up with the soft clipping diodes (overdrive) to get two different kinds of gain staging.