mkstewartesq
Well-known member
This is a Pharmacist I built as a gift for a friend. He had told me he was thinking about getting a Dr. Robert and, since PPCB made the Pharmacist, I told him I would build one as thanks for generosity he has shown me previously.
I’ll be honest that, before he brought this up, I had never heard of the Dr. Robert and didn’t know what it did or what to expect . However, several of the demos that have posted here made clear to me that it was a pretty intriguing pedal. While I love the Beatles, I don’t actually know how to play any of their songs, so testing it to see if it sounded “like it should” when completed was a bit challenging, and, because I didn’t understand exactly what the pedal was supposed to do, the interactivity of the various controls really surprised me. However, I found the manual for the Dr. Robert to be incredibly helpful to verify that everything was functioning as it was supposed to.
I do like the various sounds on tap but I’m gonna play with it a bit more before shipping it off to my friend to see if I want to build another for myself. I tend to play more clean sounds and I already have several overdrives that I rarely use (and now a Kewpie fuzz on the workbench, God only knows what I will use that for). All that being said, while I hope my friend enjoys it, I’m not sure that it’s really my personal cup of tea so far, as I find the interactivity of the controls a bit counterintuitive. To each his or her own.
Some notes:
Mike
I’ll be honest that, before he brought this up, I had never heard of the Dr. Robert and didn’t know what it did or what to expect . However, several of the demos that have posted here made clear to me that it was a pretty intriguing pedal. While I love the Beatles, I don’t actually know how to play any of their songs, so testing it to see if it sounded “like it should” when completed was a bit challenging, and, because I didn’t understand exactly what the pedal was supposed to do, the interactivity of the various controls really surprised me. However, I found the manual for the Dr. Robert to be incredibly helpful to verify that everything was functioning as it was supposed to.
I do like the various sounds on tap but I’m gonna play with it a bit more before shipping it off to my friend to see if I want to build another for myself. I tend to play more clean sounds and I already have several overdrives that I rarely use (and now a Kewpie fuzz on the workbench, God only knows what I will use that for). All that being said, while I hope my friend enjoys it, I’m not sure that it’s really my personal cup of tea so far, as I find the interactivity of the controls a bit counterintuitive. To each his or her own.
Some notes:
- Based on the various threads here, it seems like the exact gain/hFE of the 2N222As isn’t critical. I just ended up using three that measured in the very low 200s, which were the highest gain I had in my batch of those transistors.
- Because of the tight integration between the board and the foot switches, I connected them using clipped resistor leads rather than wire, and I had to assemble it in the box.(Side note - what an unholy bear it was trying to line up the 8 holes on the Boost 3PDT with the 8 leads soldered to the board to slide the switch into place.) This made it impossible (for me) to “rock it before I boxed it” so I just had to pray fervently that it would fire up on the first try, which it did.
- I originally built it with open frame jacks. Even though I followed the drill template, the open frame jacks were just about a millimeter too big in circumference and would not allow the lid on the enclosure to close, so I had to unsolder them and replace them with closed jacks. Luckily I always provide extra slack on the wiring for my jacks rather than a super tight fit, so it wasn’t a big problem to accommodate the new jacks using the existing wire - although it is no longer as neat as my original layout. If you’re going to use open frame jacks, I’d suggest moving the jack drill holes up a millimeter or so higher than shown on the drill template to be safe.
- The art is a film-free decal with clearcoat; basically it’s just the Revolver album cover slightly retitled to reflect the fact that this is a Vox emulation. Because I didn’t want the LEDs in the middle of the artwork I moved them next to the footswitches via off board wiring.
- For the 348K and 57.6K resistors, I had to roll my own. - for the 348K, I combined a 330K and an 18K, and for the 57.6K, I combined a 56K with a 1.5 K that measured around 1.6K.
- Honest to God I didn’t intentionally set out to mimic the look of the original pedal since I had never seen the original - I prefer smaller knobs but my friend is a real bear for ergonomics so I chose larger knobs I thought he would like and, unintentionally, it turns out they are the exact same knobs as on the real pedal. So, combined with the color scheme and style and exact same knobs, the end result makes me look even more uncreative than I normally do.
Mike
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