MichaelW
Well-known member
- Build Rating
When Nathan ( @vigilante398 ) announced this new offering I knew I HAD to build it!
It sounded like one of his "Space Heater" projects but with EQ.
Man, what an awesome tube tone conditioner!
It doesn't have as much "grit" as the Space Heater but it sounds HUGE. Big warm tube goodness at the front of the chain to boost your cleans or boost your dirt pedals. This is also going to be an awesome bass tube preamp.
I haven't tried it at the end of the pedal chain to warm up your signal before it hits the amp or interface but I'm positive it would work extremely well in that application as well.
The 3 band eq controls are extremely well voiced and have a huge range, you can really sculpt your tone with this thing.
Also, the layout of these Gen II DIY boards from SushiBoxFX are excellent. It's WAY easier to build than the original BE, Space Heater and Echo Foxtrot.
This comes courtesy of using a daughterboard design for the tubes, which leaves a lot more room on the main PCB where the old ones had some major crammage going on a very little room for margin of error with soldering.
@vigilante398 you absolutely knocked it out of the park with the new layouts!
Now, onto the not so great, nothing to do with the project or Nathan but my own stupidity.
When I first built the pedal, checked for power, everything was powering up, voltages were good.
I plugged it in and.......no sound with the effect on. Crestfallen and depressed I took it apart to see if I had messed something up but the build looked solid.
Everything looked good from visual inspection.
So when I ordered this board, I also ordered the new layout Black Eye from Nathan as well. Both of these projects use the same new tube daughterboard design.
So I threw all the pcbs in a bag all together. When I went to pull out the parts for the Particle Accelerator I failed to notice that for the BE there is a "Left" and "Right" tube daughterboard. The orientation is "physically" interchangeable but not electronically. Like a dummy I used the wrong daughterboard on the PA.
I realized that when I looked at the Black Eye boards and noticed I had 2 "left" tube boards, then I noticed the one I used on the PA had an "R" designation on it.
So even though everything lined up and matched up all the traces and tube connections were wrong, duhhh......
Anyway, I re-did the tube board with the correct "Left" side one and the PA fired right up after that. Now I need to see if I can salvage the one I used because the tube socket is on the wrong side of the board.
Anyway, if you're planning to build both the PA and Black Eye projects (and you SHOULD
) check the orientation of the tube daughterboards. DON'T BE LIKE MIKE! 
I ordered one of Nathan's pre-drilled enclosures with his cool CNC cuts for the vents. Painted it a Brick Red with a couple coats of clear satin over the top.
The demo I recorded below is really a Three-Fer. It's a demo for the new Wolfetone pickups in my Warmoth Strat that I posted about here.
One interesting thing, I wired the guitar using a Suhr guitar schema (For his Alt-T Dual HB Tele) and decided to try his values for the treble bleed circuit on the volume control. It's a 680pf + 150k resistor in parallel. I'd never used these values before but man, it really sounds good to me. So you see me fiddling with the volume control to show how nicely it retains the highs as its rolled off.
It's also a demo of my Hatchet Overdrive (Greer Tomahawk) build that I posted here.
In the demo I'm boosting a couple of different drive pedals with the Particle Accelerator and also stacking the Hatchet with the Mach 1 (cuz @geoffrey said so....)
From right to left: Particle Accelerator, Hatchet OD, Mach 1, Bullrush, Timbre Man.
There's a huge low end bloom that the Particle Accelerator imparts to the drives that I'm not sure comes across really well in video but it's a luscious sound.
Great stuff! I'm looking forward to building the re-vamped Black Eye.
It sounded like one of his "Space Heater" projects but with EQ.
Man, what an awesome tube tone conditioner!
It doesn't have as much "grit" as the Space Heater but it sounds HUGE. Big warm tube goodness at the front of the chain to boost your cleans or boost your dirt pedals. This is also going to be an awesome bass tube preamp.
I haven't tried it at the end of the pedal chain to warm up your signal before it hits the amp or interface but I'm positive it would work extremely well in that application as well.
The 3 band eq controls are extremely well voiced and have a huge range, you can really sculpt your tone with this thing.
Also, the layout of these Gen II DIY boards from SushiBoxFX are excellent. It's WAY easier to build than the original BE, Space Heater and Echo Foxtrot.
This comes courtesy of using a daughterboard design for the tubes, which leaves a lot more room on the main PCB where the old ones had some major crammage going on a very little room for margin of error with soldering.
@vigilante398 you absolutely knocked it out of the park with the new layouts!
Now, onto the not so great, nothing to do with the project or Nathan but my own stupidity.
When I first built the pedal, checked for power, everything was powering up, voltages were good.
I plugged it in and.......no sound with the effect on. Crestfallen and depressed I took it apart to see if I had messed something up but the build looked solid.
Everything looked good from visual inspection.
So when I ordered this board, I also ordered the new layout Black Eye from Nathan as well. Both of these projects use the same new tube daughterboard design.
So I threw all the pcbs in a bag all together. When I went to pull out the parts for the Particle Accelerator I failed to notice that for the BE there is a "Left" and "Right" tube daughterboard. The orientation is "physically" interchangeable but not electronically. Like a dummy I used the wrong daughterboard on the PA.
I realized that when I looked at the Black Eye boards and noticed I had 2 "left" tube boards, then I noticed the one I used on the PA had an "R" designation on it.
So even though everything lined up and matched up all the traces and tube connections were wrong, duhhh......
Anyway, I re-did the tube board with the correct "Left" side one and the PA fired right up after that. Now I need to see if I can salvage the one I used because the tube socket is on the wrong side of the board.
Anyway, if you're planning to build both the PA and Black Eye projects (and you SHOULD
) check the orientation of the tube daughterboards. DON'T BE LIKE MIKE! I ordered one of Nathan's pre-drilled enclosures with his cool CNC cuts for the vents. Painted it a Brick Red with a couple coats of clear satin over the top.
The demo I recorded below is really a Three-Fer. It's a demo for the new Wolfetone pickups in my Warmoth Strat that I posted about here.
One interesting thing, I wired the guitar using a Suhr guitar schema (For his Alt-T Dual HB Tele) and decided to try his values for the treble bleed circuit on the volume control. It's a 680pf + 150k resistor in parallel. I'd never used these values before but man, it really sounds good to me. So you see me fiddling with the volume control to show how nicely it retains the highs as its rolled off.
It's also a demo of my Hatchet Overdrive (Greer Tomahawk) build that I posted here.
In the demo I'm boosting a couple of different drive pedals with the Particle Accelerator and also stacking the Hatchet with the Mach 1 (cuz @geoffrey said so....
)From right to left: Particle Accelerator, Hatchet OD, Mach 1, Bullrush, Timbre Man.
There's a huge low end bloom that the Particle Accelerator imparts to the drives that I'm not sure comes across really well in video but it's a luscious sound.
Great stuff! I'm looking forward to building the re-vamped Black Eye.
