MichaelW
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This is my second time building the Southern Belle.
The first time I built it was very early in my pedal building, and it was part of my first ever combo build where I paired it up with the Mach 1.
It was my first experience with either pedal but the Mach 1 (Greer LightSpeed) was highly praised as a low gain drive. (Which it is, I still love it!)
I did not love the Southern Belle, however. Which is ironic as they are so very close in circuitry that you could build the Mach 1 on the SoBelle board.
But to me the SoBelle just sounded too bright, too trebly and too thin. I've never quite understood why since it seems to only be adding a pair of Bat41's to the Mach 1 circuit.
As you can see from the thread of my original build, there were some suggestions on how to modify the SoBelle to be less trebly but in my attempt to replace a cap I killed the pedal. (Remember this was pretty early on in my building, I could not get a board out of the box without killing something heh).
Since I didn't care for the SoBelle anyway, I decided to bag it, and migrate the working Mach 1 half into a single enclosure.
Fast forward a year and half later, I'm not sure what had me interested in revisiting the SoBelle but I thought I'd give it another shot.
But I also decided to color outside the lines a little bit. In place of the Bat41 diodes I decided to put a pair of really low vf germanium diodes.
And for extra mojo points, I decided to use a pair of my Mullard CV7364 radial diodes. These have the most unique sound of any of the Ge's I've used.
They also typically have very low forward voltage and will clip pretty early. The pair I randomly pulled out of my bag measured .233/.234 respectively on my DCA75 Pro. Close match and I figured it would do the trick.
So anyway, I built it out, fired it up and WOW, it's like a completely different pedal. I was expecting it to clip sooner, have more compression from the low vf Ge's but the effect was way more than I expected. So the end result is it doesn't sound much like a SoBelle anymore, but I LOVE how it sounds now!
There's definitely a hit to the overall output as a result of the clippers, but it's not too bad. The gain now is really creamy and compressed and not overly trebly like the stock version. I'm totally digging it, and it still pairs and stacks well with the Mach 1.
This was a surprisingly pleasant outcome to some component swapping.
I recorded a short demo to show how it sounds.
I used a really cool enclosure from AmplifiedParts. It's a hammered green. This is the first time I've used their enclosures and the quality of the powder coating is superb. They're also not cheap....pricey sucker. But gorgeous nonetheless.
It even comes with matching screws.....
Here's the demo.
The first time I built it was very early in my pedal building, and it was part of my first ever combo build where I paired it up with the Mach 1.
It was my first experience with either pedal but the Mach 1 (Greer LightSpeed) was highly praised as a low gain drive. (Which it is, I still love it!)
I did not love the Southern Belle, however. Which is ironic as they are so very close in circuitry that you could build the Mach 1 on the SoBelle board.
But to me the SoBelle just sounded too bright, too trebly and too thin. I've never quite understood why since it seems to only be adding a pair of Bat41's to the Mach 1 circuit.
As you can see from the thread of my original build, there were some suggestions on how to modify the SoBelle to be less trebly but in my attempt to replace a cap I killed the pedal. (Remember this was pretty early on in my building, I could not get a board out of the box without killing something heh).
Since I didn't care for the SoBelle anyway, I decided to bag it, and migrate the working Mach 1 half into a single enclosure.
Fast forward a year and half later, I'm not sure what had me interested in revisiting the SoBelle but I thought I'd give it another shot.
But I also decided to color outside the lines a little bit. In place of the Bat41 diodes I decided to put a pair of really low vf germanium diodes.
And for extra mojo points, I decided to use a pair of my Mullard CV7364 radial diodes. These have the most unique sound of any of the Ge's I've used.
They also typically have very low forward voltage and will clip pretty early. The pair I randomly pulled out of my bag measured .233/.234 respectively on my DCA75 Pro. Close match and I figured it would do the trick.
So anyway, I built it out, fired it up and WOW, it's like a completely different pedal. I was expecting it to clip sooner, have more compression from the low vf Ge's but the effect was way more than I expected. So the end result is it doesn't sound much like a SoBelle anymore, but I LOVE how it sounds now!
There's definitely a hit to the overall output as a result of the clippers, but it's not too bad. The gain now is really creamy and compressed and not overly trebly like the stock version. I'm totally digging it, and it still pairs and stacks well with the Mach 1.
This was a surprisingly pleasant outcome to some component swapping.
I recorded a short demo to show how it sounds.
I used a really cool enclosure from AmplifiedParts. It's a hammered green. This is the first time I've used their enclosures and the quality of the powder coating is superb. They're also not cheap....pricey sucker. But gorgeous nonetheless.
It even comes with matching screws.....
Here's the demo.
