MichaelW
Well-known member
- Build Rating
Temperatures in my garage finally got above 60 degrees F today, so bundled up in a parka I ventured out to knock the icicles off my soldering iron and try to build a pedal...... 
.
It's been nuts since last week. It got down into the 40's inside my garage. My blood is too thin to be soldering at those temps.
This is the last of my pre-drilled enclosures that have been sitting for a couple of weeks. I totally borked the drilling of this pedal (although it hides well under the knobs). Turns out my stepped drill bit finally is getting dull after 80 or so pedals and it was wandering when I was drilling.
It was a standard 4 hole PPCB format so I just chucked it aside and drilled a new one for what I was building at the time. But it bugs me to have an empty enclosure so I decided to revisit the enclosure today and see if I couldn't make it work. Rat tail file and some "English" on the pot legs to the rescue. It turned out ok after all.
The Skylight Overdrive is another pedal I had no idea existed until I saw it mentioned in an old thread by someone. So I decided to look into it and turns out it's a Bjorn Juhl design so that caught my attention. Doing some googling it seems like it was the "hot pedal of the minute" about 12-13 years ago, so grabbed one in my last PPCB order.
I had ordered some 2N3819 JFETs in anticipation of building this during the SmallBear Black Friday sale and promptly forgot I did. When I was reviewing the BOM today I was planning to build it out with 2N5457's socketed and then order some 2N3819's from Smallbear and then swap them out later. So I figured as long as I was paying for shipping I'd take a look and see what other transistors I needed, and rummaging through my transistor box found the 3819's I originally bought last month....duh......
I used my last B1K pot a few weeks ago so had to hack a B5k with a parallel resistor. It works but the taper is a bit off. Other than that, everything else is stock to the BOM.
Build went smooth, not a lot of components. I spent more time messing with the enclosure to get it to fit than actually soldering.
This is a very unusual overdrive bordering on distortion. The build docs and old marketing copy claim that it's designed to push an already overdrive amp or provide "light" overdrive to a clean amp. So I was pretty surprised when I found that it has a LOT of gain. I would categorize it as a lighter distortion pedal as opposed to an overdrive. It doesn't sound like anything else I've built so far but the closest I would say might be the Mystery Meat at certain settings.
The controls are interesting. Aside from the level and gain knobs, there's a "Texture" knob and a "Z" knob.
The Texture knob sounds like it's affecting the high mids somewhat and adds some subtle compression or fullness to the sound. Turned all the way down it gets into the "Timmy" territory where it's a bit more transparent, but it's a pretty subtle effect.
The "Z" knob is where this pedal has some magic in my opinion. When I first started messing with it, it seemed like a cool high gain pedal and I was wondering where the "light overdrive" was. The "Z" control adjusts the input impedance and the most noticeable affect of adjusting this knob is how your pickups and guitar volume knob react to the pedal. So with the gain at noon, which is pretty gainy, I can back off the volume knob and get the "light overdrive".
Set up that way, you can ride the guitar's volume knob and get everywhere from edge of breakup to full on distortion with just the volume pot.
It seems to work better for single coils than hum buckers, used this way and using my P90 50's wiring guitars there's a lot of different sounds I can get just using the guitar controls. Very cool!
Glad I built this and plan on spending some more time digging into what else it can do. It's got me interested in the other Mad Professor pedals in @Robert 's catalog now!
.It's been nuts since last week. It got down into the 40's inside my garage. My blood is too thin to be soldering at those temps.
This is the last of my pre-drilled enclosures that have been sitting for a couple of weeks. I totally borked the drilling of this pedal (although it hides well under the knobs). Turns out my stepped drill bit finally is getting dull after 80 or so pedals and it was wandering when I was drilling.
It was a standard 4 hole PPCB format so I just chucked it aside and drilled a new one for what I was building at the time. But it bugs me to have an empty enclosure so I decided to revisit the enclosure today and see if I couldn't make it work. Rat tail file and some "English" on the pot legs to the rescue. It turned out ok after all.
The Skylight Overdrive is another pedal I had no idea existed until I saw it mentioned in an old thread by someone. So I decided to look into it and turns out it's a Bjorn Juhl design so that caught my attention. Doing some googling it seems like it was the "hot pedal of the minute" about 12-13 years ago, so grabbed one in my last PPCB order.
I had ordered some 2N3819 JFETs in anticipation of building this during the SmallBear Black Friday sale and promptly forgot I did. When I was reviewing the BOM today I was planning to build it out with 2N5457's socketed and then order some 2N3819's from Smallbear and then swap them out later. So I figured as long as I was paying for shipping I'd take a look and see what other transistors I needed, and rummaging through my transistor box found the 3819's I originally bought last month....duh......
I used my last B1K pot a few weeks ago so had to hack a B5k with a parallel resistor. It works but the taper is a bit off. Other than that, everything else is stock to the BOM.
Build went smooth, not a lot of components. I spent more time messing with the enclosure to get it to fit than actually soldering.
This is a very unusual overdrive bordering on distortion. The build docs and old marketing copy claim that it's designed to push an already overdrive amp or provide "light" overdrive to a clean amp. So I was pretty surprised when I found that it has a LOT of gain. I would categorize it as a lighter distortion pedal as opposed to an overdrive. It doesn't sound like anything else I've built so far but the closest I would say might be the Mystery Meat at certain settings.
The controls are interesting. Aside from the level and gain knobs, there's a "Texture" knob and a "Z" knob.
The Texture knob sounds like it's affecting the high mids somewhat and adds some subtle compression or fullness to the sound. Turned all the way down it gets into the "Timmy" territory where it's a bit more transparent, but it's a pretty subtle effect.
The "Z" knob is where this pedal has some magic in my opinion. When I first started messing with it, it seemed like a cool high gain pedal and I was wondering where the "light overdrive" was. The "Z" control adjusts the input impedance and the most noticeable affect of adjusting this knob is how your pickups and guitar volume knob react to the pedal. So with the gain at noon, which is pretty gainy, I can back off the volume knob and get the "light overdrive".
Set up that way, you can ride the guitar's volume knob and get everywhere from edge of breakup to full on distortion with just the volume pot.
It seems to work better for single coils than hum buckers, used this way and using my P90 50's wiring guitars there's a lot of different sounds I can get just using the guitar controls. Very cool!
Glad I built this and plan on spending some more time digging into what else it can do. It's got me interested in the other Mad Professor pedals in @Robert 's catalog now!
