rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This is my report on a build of the Sabbath Distortion, based on the Catalinbread Sabbra Cadabra. I'm a big fan of Black Sabbath, and this pedal was supposed to have the "Sabbath sound," which I think it does.
Inspiration
Straight off, I was thinking about metal birds for this pedal. Now there's the Butcherbird, but I already made a pedal based on that. @HamishR suggested the Cassowary, as a bird that can kill people, and I agree that's pretty metal. But I've already selected a different petal to use as the bird for - before I decided to rehouse this one.
Enter the Lammergeier, also known as the Bearded Vulture. This beauty, a native of Europe, is the only vertebrate whose diet consists of 70%-90% bone. That's pretty metal! Not only that, but they'll also carry bones high up in the air and drop them on rocks to smash them, making them easier to eat. Check out this short video if you want to see more about the Lammergeier.
Having selected my bird, I was thinking about what kind of artwork to go for. The original pedal is named the Sabbra Cadabra, which is a song on the album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I've always found that to be a striking album cover. So, I decided to replicate the color scheme of of the album. I couldn't get the fonts quite right, and I didn't feel great about the contrast with the yellow rectangle in the background, so I omitted that. But I think the color looks really striking, and the bright pink knobs on matte-black enclosure looks really good. And to be honest, this isn't really that big a color-shift of the Lammergeier's plumage anyway (I find it quite beautiful)! My research indicated that the font on the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album art is custom-drawn, so I went with a similar-looking metal font.
I'm very happy with the result!
The Build
So this was actually one of the very first pedals I built, from my first PedalPCB order. I can't recall if it worked right away, I feel like I might have had to do a little debugging. It's kinda fun to open up this build (from ~June 2024) and see how my build quality has improved. At the time I wasn't socketing anything, I didn't use metal film resistors, I was using all ceramic capacitors for smaller values (rather than MLCC), I was using exceptionally crappy audio jacks from Amazon, I was using 'innie' DC jacks, and I was using daughterboards that came with my footswitches from Amazon.
I popped it out, switched to an outie DC jack, swapped in shielded wires for the input and output, switched the LED to pink, and put it in the new enclosure. No problems!
The Pedal
It pretty much nails the tone. Sabbath has a lot of great riffs so this is a fun one to just flip on and play. I don't think it's a particularly unique pedal, but I like that you can get a pretty nice Sabbath-sounding tone without much mucking around.
The only problem is that the background noise is pretty bad. The shielded cables help a bit, but there's no getting around the fact that this is just a very noisy pedal. I believe that goes for the original as well. Of course, my component selection probably didn't help much either.
Firsts
Pedal rating: 4/5
Inspiration
Straight off, I was thinking about metal birds for this pedal. Now there's the Butcherbird, but I already made a pedal based on that. @HamishR suggested the Cassowary, as a bird that can kill people, and I agree that's pretty metal. But I've already selected a different petal to use as the bird for - before I decided to rehouse this one.
Enter the Lammergeier, also known as the Bearded Vulture. This beauty, a native of Europe, is the only vertebrate whose diet consists of 70%-90% bone. That's pretty metal! Not only that, but they'll also carry bones high up in the air and drop them on rocks to smash them, making them easier to eat. Check out this short video if you want to see more about the Lammergeier.
Having selected my bird, I was thinking about what kind of artwork to go for. The original pedal is named the Sabbra Cadabra, which is a song on the album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I've always found that to be a striking album cover. So, I decided to replicate the color scheme of of the album. I couldn't get the fonts quite right, and I didn't feel great about the contrast with the yellow rectangle in the background, so I omitted that. But I think the color looks really striking, and the bright pink knobs on matte-black enclosure looks really good. And to be honest, this isn't really that big a color-shift of the Lammergeier's plumage anyway (I find it quite beautiful)! My research indicated that the font on the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album art is custom-drawn, so I went with a similar-looking metal font.
I'm very happy with the result!
The Build
So this was actually one of the very first pedals I built, from my first PedalPCB order. I can't recall if it worked right away, I feel like I might have had to do a little debugging. It's kinda fun to open up this build (from ~June 2024) and see how my build quality has improved. At the time I wasn't socketing anything, I didn't use metal film resistors, I was using all ceramic capacitors for smaller values (rather than MLCC), I was using exceptionally crappy audio jacks from Amazon, I was using 'innie' DC jacks, and I was using daughterboards that came with my footswitches from Amazon.
I popped it out, switched to an outie DC jack, swapped in shielded wires for the input and output, switched the LED to pink, and put it in the new enclosure. No problems!
The Pedal
It pretty much nails the tone. Sabbath has a lot of great riffs so this is a fun one to just flip on and play. I don't think it's a particularly unique pedal, but I like that you can get a pretty nice Sabbath-sounding tone without much mucking around.
The only problem is that the background noise is pretty bad. The shielded cables help a bit, but there's no getting around the fact that this is just a very noisy pedal. I believe that goes for the original as well. Of course, my component selection probably didn't help much either.
Firsts
First pedal revisited after >1 year
Pedal rating: 4/5
