rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This is my report on a build of the Skidmark Pedals "Sonofier" boost, a fairly versatile boost pedal. @coltonius shared the build doc on the forums. The gerber is available here.
Inspiration
I've been trying to cover a lot of the common birds here in the Pacific Northwest, and the Song Sparrow is one of the most common of them all. This little bird is very common in the undergrowth and shrubs - it's frequently found in parks and on hikes. As the name would suggest, it has a pleasant song and a rather distinctive "chimp chimp" call. So it fit well with a rather unassuming boost pedal called a "Sonofier."
I wanted to lean in to the sticker kind of aesthetic and went with a matte white pedal, and musical notes around the mouth, I tried various leaves (such as salal) the background and went with more of an abstraction.
The Build
It's a straightforward build without a lot of parts, although Cees suggests: "Now the use of the ‘posh’ OPA2134 op-amp might be debatable when comparing datasheets, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole. When I kick it in, it inspires me to play, when I switch it off, I’m suddenly just missing ‘something’…" In my gutshot you can see I had a TL072, but after rereading the build doc I've swapped in an OPA2134 to avoid missing 'something'
. I didn't do an immediate "before and after," but I do think the OPA2134 sounds a little clearer, it does have a nice clean tone.
There were two complicating factors. First off, I wanted to follow Cees' wiring as much as possible. After all, there's plenty of room to work with. But this means a ton of extra wiring, as every pin on the footswitch is connected to the board. But that's not too big a deal.
More painful was that I build out the pedal to test with an Auditorium, and then afterwards ordered an enclosure. As I was mounting a different one-knob pedal, I realized that my one-knob layouts don't work well for enclosures where I want the pot pushed as high as possible to leave room for artwork. I'd put the pot at the bottom of the board and then the rest of the PCB above - I think in some misguided attempt to make the overall footprint as small as possible. But the result is that this pushes the board up high enough that it will collide with jacks. Of course, I could have wired the pot offboard, but I wanted to prove out the thing and be satisfied with the gerber I shared on github. So I had to do a board redesign. No big deal, but it meant a bunch of waiting around for new PCBs to arrive.
The Pedal
It's a boost, but kinda an odd one. In the build doc, Cees described this as "an always on (non-inverting) buffer, followed by a switchable (inverting) opamp with a modest 6 dB boost/attenuation. It’s actually pretty close to the ‘amp’ secton of the Sonomatic Deluxe Delay, hence the name Sonofier
It adds a certain elusive warmth to the signal, regardless if you use it purely as a clean boost, or push a near to break up amp. With the gain knob at noon the Sonofier operates at unity gain, so you can also use it for numerous utlity purposes. (phase inverting, buffering, attenuation, etc.)"
Well, I'm not sure about all of that. It's kinda funny that it's a boost pedal has unity gain at noon, but I guess it's nice that you can attenuate with it, I'll have to try it after the effects loop on my amp. The boost itself is basically just a boost. When I compare it to the Way Huge Angry Troll, it's maybe slightly more clear or sparkly. If I had to pick one, though, I'd rather get some of the gain (and extreme boost) that the Angry Troll offers.
Build rating: 3/5
Pedal rating: 4/5
Inspiration
I've been trying to cover a lot of the common birds here in the Pacific Northwest, and the Song Sparrow is one of the most common of them all. This little bird is very common in the undergrowth and shrubs - it's frequently found in parks and on hikes. As the name would suggest, it has a pleasant song and a rather distinctive "chimp chimp" call. So it fit well with a rather unassuming boost pedal called a "Sonofier."
I wanted to lean in to the sticker kind of aesthetic and went with a matte white pedal, and musical notes around the mouth, I tried various leaves (such as salal) the background and went with more of an abstraction.
The Build
It's a straightforward build without a lot of parts, although Cees suggests: "Now the use of the ‘posh’ OPA2134 op-amp might be debatable when comparing datasheets, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole. When I kick it in, it inspires me to play, when I switch it off, I’m suddenly just missing ‘something’…" In my gutshot you can see I had a TL072, but after rereading the build doc I've swapped in an OPA2134 to avoid missing 'something'
. I didn't do an immediate "before and after," but I do think the OPA2134 sounds a little clearer, it does have a nice clean tone.There were two complicating factors. First off, I wanted to follow Cees' wiring as much as possible. After all, there's plenty of room to work with. But this means a ton of extra wiring, as every pin on the footswitch is connected to the board. But that's not too big a deal.
More painful was that I build out the pedal to test with an Auditorium, and then afterwards ordered an enclosure. As I was mounting a different one-knob pedal, I realized that my one-knob layouts don't work well for enclosures where I want the pot pushed as high as possible to leave room for artwork. I'd put the pot at the bottom of the board and then the rest of the PCB above - I think in some misguided attempt to make the overall footprint as small as possible. But the result is that this pushes the board up high enough that it will collide with jacks. Of course, I could have wired the pot offboard, but I wanted to prove out the thing and be satisfied with the gerber I shared on github. So I had to do a board redesign. No big deal, but it meant a bunch of waiting around for new PCBs to arrive.
The Pedal
It's a boost, but kinda an odd one. In the build doc, Cees described this as "an always on (non-inverting) buffer, followed by a switchable (inverting) opamp with a modest 6 dB boost/attenuation. It’s actually pretty close to the ‘amp’ secton of the Sonomatic Deluxe Delay, hence the name Sonofier
It adds a certain elusive warmth to the signal, regardless if you use it purely as a clean boost, or push a near to break up amp. With the gain knob at noon the Sonofier operates at unity gain, so you can also use it for numerous utlity purposes. (phase inverting, buffering, attenuation, etc.)"Well, I'm not sure about all of that. It's kinda funny that it's a boost pedal has unity gain at noon, but I guess it's nice that you can attenuate with it, I'll have to try it after the effects loop on my amp. The boost itself is basically just a boost. When I compare it to the Way Huge Angry Troll, it's maybe slightly more clear or sparkly. If I had to pick one, though, I'd rather get some of the gain (and extreme boost) that the Angry Troll offers.
Build rating: 3/5
Pedal rating: 4/5
