Resinite Overdrive (Mad Professor Amber Drive)

MichaelW

Well-known member
Build Rating
5.00 star(s)
Well, we're back to shorts and flip flop weather here in Florida, so my "soldering juices" are starting to flow (thaw out) again:)

Interesting that a search through the forum and I have not seen any build reports for this pedal.

When I built the Skylight Drive (Mad Professor Sky Blue) I loved it so much that I started searching for what other BJFE designed pedals in the PPCB catalog.

I ordered the Resinite and the Splendiferous. (The latter is on my bench right now waiting to be populated).
I decided to start with the Resinite first.

Some oddball components like most Mad Prof pedals but I still had some 2N3819 Jfets from building the Skylight. The only sub I had to make was for the 2N5485 which I could not find anywhere. I decided to use an MMBF4393 mounted on an adapter. I socketed it just in case, but it seems to be working fine.

This is a very very different pedal from the Skylight yet it has that signature "chewiness" that I've really come to dig a lot.
It's marketed as an overdrive bordering on fuzz to emulate a heavily driven tube amp. That's an apt description and from a circuit perspective it looks somewhat like an SI fuzz into a JFET based overdrive. Sound wise it's a bit reminiscent of the Red Llama but with a lot more articulation and dynamics. So if you like the Red Llama but wished for a bit more nuance, then this pedal is for you!

This thing has a TON of gain, I'm running the gain knob at around 9 o'clock, which is where I'm finding the most dynamics. And like the Skylight it responds extremely well to the volume control on your guitar to dial in everything from edge of breakup to full on in your face saturation. Pretty cool!
My build sounds a lot like the demo's of it on the Mad Prof website and Mike Herman's video.

I'll also add that it sounds better to me running to a Marshall-type amp as opposed to a Fender style. Even running into a clean amp and it can produce over the top overdriven, super saturated tones, yet still retain note articulation and dynamics.

As always, super smooth build, board is laid out with typical @Robert symmetry and I breezed through the build very quickly.

Really looking forward to building the Splendiferous, might start that this afternoon.

I used a Tayda Orange Sand enclosure with some black "ginooowine" Davies mini's.

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