mkstewartesq
Well-known member
- Build Rating
I was very lucky to acquire a DS-2 board offered by @dan.schumaker in the trading forum. While I had used some Boss pedals in the past long ago (SD-1, OD-2 and CE-2), I’ve never played around with a DS-2, and the Nirvana connection intrigued me so I went for it.
The build: it was a pretty straightforward build generally, although a bit fiddly with 1/8 watt resistors. No issues except that it took me quite a bit longer to do the “where’s Waldo“ associated with a board laid out in refdes (PPCB boards have put me squarely on “team values”). The 3PDT is another matter entirely – it’s a horrorshow because I hadn’t manually wired 3PDT in forever and wanted to complete the build this weekend. So that’s on me, and rewiring that stomp to look a bit nicer is something I’ll have to take up further down the road.
Sound: Since I’ve never used a DS-2, I can’t speak 100% to the fidelity- but, to my ears, it sounds great and seems to match up roughly with what I would expect from videos I have seen of the real pedal. There’s a nice difference in the two positions on the Turbo control (although I’ll be honest that I’m not sure which position is which - the upper position is a bit darker while the lower position is more lively and saturated, so I’m going to assume the lower position is “Turbo”. Similarly, you can get pretty much a clean sound by dialing the gain all the way down with the switch in the top position whereas, once you flip it to the bottom, the signal never quite gets truly clean). In any event, just based on my limited testing, this is a lot of fun to play and a nice addition to my arsenal of overdrives, distortions, and fuzzes.
EDIT TO ADD - after playing it a bit, I would suggest following the advice of @Guardians of the analog to consider replacing the linear taper of the Gain pot with a log taper. With the linear taper, there really isn’t much difference in gain after about 9 o’clock. I expect that a different taper would give you a much more usable range.
The art: since this pedal is closely associated with In Utero, the last studio album Nirvana made before Kurt lost his battles to addiction and depression, I wanted to allude to that in the art. So I placed the angel from the album cover in a field of poppies, with a threatening sky growing overhead. The squared-off top edges looked better on paper than on the actual enclosure – I should’ve just rounded them like I did the bottom edges.
The medium is a film free decal. Something is definitely up with the batch of glue included in my most recent package from Sunnyscopa. It just seems to cure twice as quickly as normal. In my build report for the last pedal I built (Cataclysm Delay), I noted that the film was incredibly difficult to remove after my normal initial bake of 10 minutes and the glue had already cured by that point. This time around I cut my initial curing time in half and the film removed easily and the decal looked great. However I did the second bake for the normal time and the surface started showing defects which ultimately resulted in a bit of bubbling. I can only assume that once the glue has cured, additional heat is essentially going to cook it in a bad way. So, at least for any future decals from this batch, I’m going to do both the initial bake and the final curing bake at half the time I normally would. (Or even less for the final bake – it just occurred to dummy me that since I’m going to coat the whole thing with clearcoat, making the final cure “rock solid” as I normally would isn’t really necessary.)
Mike
The build: it was a pretty straightforward build generally, although a bit fiddly with 1/8 watt resistors. No issues except that it took me quite a bit longer to do the “where’s Waldo“ associated with a board laid out in refdes (PPCB boards have put me squarely on “team values”). The 3PDT is another matter entirely – it’s a horrorshow because I hadn’t manually wired 3PDT in forever and wanted to complete the build this weekend. So that’s on me, and rewiring that stomp to look a bit nicer is something I’ll have to take up further down the road.
Sound: Since I’ve never used a DS-2, I can’t speak 100% to the fidelity- but, to my ears, it sounds great and seems to match up roughly with what I would expect from videos I have seen of the real pedal. There’s a nice difference in the two positions on the Turbo control (although I’ll be honest that I’m not sure which position is which - the upper position is a bit darker while the lower position is more lively and saturated, so I’m going to assume the lower position is “Turbo”. Similarly, you can get pretty much a clean sound by dialing the gain all the way down with the switch in the top position whereas, once you flip it to the bottom, the signal never quite gets truly clean). In any event, just based on my limited testing, this is a lot of fun to play and a nice addition to my arsenal of overdrives, distortions, and fuzzes.
EDIT TO ADD - after playing it a bit, I would suggest following the advice of @Guardians of the analog to consider replacing the linear taper of the Gain pot with a log taper. With the linear taper, there really isn’t much difference in gain after about 9 o’clock. I expect that a different taper would give you a much more usable range.
The art: since this pedal is closely associated with In Utero, the last studio album Nirvana made before Kurt lost his battles to addiction and depression, I wanted to allude to that in the art. So I placed the angel from the album cover in a field of poppies, with a threatening sky growing overhead. The squared-off top edges looked better on paper than on the actual enclosure – I should’ve just rounded them like I did the bottom edges.
The medium is a film free decal. Something is definitely up with the batch of glue included in my most recent package from Sunnyscopa. It just seems to cure twice as quickly as normal. In my build report for the last pedal I built (Cataclysm Delay), I noted that the film was incredibly difficult to remove after my normal initial bake of 10 minutes and the glue had already cured by that point. This time around I cut my initial curing time in half and the film removed easily and the decal looked great. However I did the second bake for the normal time and the surface started showing defects which ultimately resulted in a bit of bubbling. I can only assume that once the glue has cured, additional heat is essentially going to cook it in a bad way. So, at least for any future decals from this batch, I’m going to do both the initial bake and the final curing bake at half the time I normally would. (Or even less for the final bake – it just occurred to dummy me that since I’m going to coat the whole thing with clearcoat, making the final cure “rock solid” as I normally would isn’t really necessary.)
Mike
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