Silver Blues
Well-known member
- Build Rating
Quite some time ago (almost a year, WTF) I shared my adventures with rattle-can finishing my Sushi Box Particle Accelerator enclosure in the "What's on your Workbench?" thread. Despite the inevitable imperfections, it turned out pretty well, and I was just waiting to find the time and motivation to package it up and send it to AmplifyFun for UV printing. Well, that day came and I got the enclosure back last week, and put the pedal together last night, so here we have it:
I have to say that seeing the finished product of this build is quite satisfying! The whole architecture of the aesthetic was my partner's idea; I was just going to put the plane on there and leave it at that, but searching for a way to make it less "empty"-looking made it spiral into this final form. I described the paint process in the link above so won't belabour it here (TL;DR it's blue, made with a bunch of hardware store bullshit). I used the below, very cool picture of an F-16 taking off as the basis for the plane graphic:
And I just want to take a moment to zoom in a bit on the details,
firstly because I think they're clever (
- how many can you catch?) and secondly because it is just another example of how excellent Spencer's printing services are. I was very concerned that the details wouldn't print clearly because of how small they are, but it turns out my concerns were completely unfounded, so kudos are in order for that. The ink even sticks perfectly well to my homemade paint job with no observable blemishing, which is probably even more impressive.
The text is rendered in the font Zekton and we decided to give it a funky vapourwave/Tequila Sunrise sort of colour scheme (??????). Knobs are pink Magpies from LMS (gorgeous) and the switch is the standard LMS Pro 3PDT. The tube backlight/indicator LED is yellow.
I can never complain too much about Sushi Box builds, the worst part of this build was cleaning the flux off the board (which is to say, it went extremely smoothly). After handling the hefty Black Eye and the behemoth Nobelium, this one feels strangely lightweight!
So how does it sound? Well, I think I can safely say that my particles have been duly accelerated. All of the je ne sais quoi tubey goodness is here in spades, and the way it fattens up your tone makes me actually want to use the bridge pickups in my basses. As with the Nobelium and Black Eye, the tone stack here is subtle in the best way possible. I'm not getting any speaker-exploding bass or glass-shattering treble at the maximum positions, and the mid control is more "P-bass mid focus" than "boxy practice amp", which is perfect. With 80/20 neck:bridge on my SRMS805, gain at 11 o'clock and dialing in a slight mid scoop (attained by boosting the treble and bass) I can get a tone that is not necessarily accurate to, but sits so well in the mix with, Clutch's "The Swollen Goat". I chose to go with a JJ 5751 in this build for the lower gain, and though I really like the tone, I'm sort of disappointed that it doesn't quite break up with the gain dimed, though you can hear the push. I'll leave it for now, but I might be inclined to go for a full 12AX7 in here so I can get a bit of drive (and maybe cop a nice "Whatever It Is, I Just Can't Stop" tone...
). I think this is also going to be really fun to stack with my other Sushi Boxes - this plus the Space Heater will probably make a super nice Fenderish dirty preamp setup. Another home run from @vigilante398 !
I have to say that seeing the finished product of this build is quite satisfying! The whole architecture of the aesthetic was my partner's idea; I was just going to put the plane on there and leave it at that, but searching for a way to make it less "empty"-looking made it spiral into this final form. I described the paint process in the link above so won't belabour it here (TL;DR it's blue, made with a bunch of hardware store bullshit). I used the below, very cool picture of an F-16 taking off as the basis for the plane graphic:
And I just want to take a moment to zoom in a bit on the details,
firstly because I think they're clever (
- how many can you catch?) and secondly because it is just another example of how excellent Spencer's printing services are. I was very concerned that the details wouldn't print clearly because of how small they are, but it turns out my concerns were completely unfounded, so kudos are in order for that. The ink even sticks perfectly well to my homemade paint job with no observable blemishing, which is probably even more impressive.The text is rendered in the font Zekton and we decided to give it a funky vapourwave/Tequila Sunrise sort of colour scheme (??????). Knobs are pink Magpies from LMS (gorgeous) and the switch is the standard LMS Pro 3PDT. The tube backlight/indicator LED is yellow.
I can never complain too much about Sushi Box builds, the worst part of this build was cleaning the flux off the board (which is to say, it went extremely smoothly). After handling the hefty Black Eye and the behemoth Nobelium, this one feels strangely lightweight!
So how does it sound? Well, I think I can safely say that my particles have been duly accelerated. All of the je ne sais quoi tubey goodness is here in spades, and the way it fattens up your tone makes me actually want to use the bridge pickups in my basses. As with the Nobelium and Black Eye, the tone stack here is subtle in the best way possible. I'm not getting any speaker-exploding bass or glass-shattering treble at the maximum positions, and the mid control is more "P-bass mid focus" than "boxy practice amp", which is perfect. With 80/20 neck:bridge on my SRMS805, gain at 11 o'clock and dialing in a slight mid scoop (attained by boosting the treble and bass) I can get a tone that is not necessarily accurate to, but sits so well in the mix with, Clutch's "The Swollen Goat". I chose to go with a JJ 5751 in this build for the lower gain, and though I really like the tone, I'm sort of disappointed that it doesn't quite break up with the gain dimed, though you can hear the push. I'll leave it for now, but I might be inclined to go for a full 12AX7 in here so I can get a bit of drive (and maybe cop a nice "Whatever It Is, I Just Can't Stop" tone...
). I think this is also going to be really fun to stack with my other Sushi Boxes - this plus the Space Heater will probably make a super nice Fenderish dirty preamp setup. Another home run from @vigilante398 !
