rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This is a report for @szukalski's Blue Sheep from his Dylan159 layouts, based on Dylan159's Blue Pilot. Now it's the "Great Blues Driver." That's a lot of names for one pedal! This was in the very first batch of PCBs I had made by JLCPCB. I like the blues driver/blues breaker tone. It was a great gateway drug to making manufacturing PCBs, and at this point I've made at least half of the layouts that Szukalski has shared.
Inspiration
What kind of bird fits with a great-sounding blues driver? A Great Blue Heron, naturally. Too on the nose?
I love great blue herons. They're weird birds. Long skinny snake neck, huge bird, flappy ponytail hair-feathers, and very pre-historic looking. Easy to spot in the Pacific Northwest, since they stand out in swampy areas and aren't afraid of people. And they seem to look right back at you when you watch them. I always have a gut reaction of "what is that thing?!" when I first see one in the air, because they're so big, like a low-flying airplane. You can also visit heron rookeries, dozens of herons have in enormous nests in trees:
By the way, The Boy and The Heron is a fun Ghibli movie, although the heron character isn't quite what I expected.
In terms of the pedal design, I'm pretty happy with it. The background is messier than I'd like, and based on more recent designs, I think I'd probably shake up the pedal to drop the background and just have the heron with reflection and ripples. But the swampy feel is fun. The design is UV printed on a lawn green tayda enclosure.
The Build
It's a straightforward build. I really appreciate Dylan159's designs, because the components are all easy to find and they tend to have common values. For this pedal in particular you can probably find all the components already in your stock. Szukalski's layout is also quite nice, and feels a lot like building a PedalPCB pedal. As I said above, it was the gateway drug for me to build self-fabricated PCBs.
I did have one problem: I always test with an Auditorium before boxing, and when I hooked this up I couldn't hear anything. Quite disappointing! I randomly disconnected the GND and SW footswitch pads (I think I saw a hint somewhere on the forum as I was debugging), and it worked fine. Once fully wired it's also fine. I've noticed this on a few of the other Szukalski layouts, but not on any other builds. Not sure why it does this. But then, I don't install or care much about the LED when testing on the Auditorium, so I don't need to hook those up...
The Pedal
I really like this pedal. The pre/gain knobs aren't quite intuitive to me, but by playing around with them, I can get tones that range from a boost, through overdrive, all the way to fuzz. There's a lot of versatility. On the other hand, not every setting sounds good.
It is a bit noisy when both gain and pre are above noon. You can see in my (somewhat messy) gutshot that I ended up using shielded cable, which I'm still getting the hang of. @MichaelW has a good demo here. Szukalski has some good advice about how to use the Blue Sheep here.
Firsts
Pedal rating: 5/5
Inspiration
What kind of bird fits with a great-sounding blues driver? A Great Blue Heron, naturally. Too on the nose?
I love great blue herons. They're weird birds. Long skinny snake neck, huge bird, flappy ponytail hair-feathers, and very pre-historic looking. Easy to spot in the Pacific Northwest, since they stand out in swampy areas and aren't afraid of people. And they seem to look right back at you when you watch them. I always have a gut reaction of "what is that thing?!" when I first see one in the air, because they're so big, like a low-flying airplane. You can also visit heron rookeries, dozens of herons have in enormous nests in trees:
By the way, The Boy and The Heron is a fun Ghibli movie, although the heron character isn't quite what I expected.
In terms of the pedal design, I'm pretty happy with it. The background is messier than I'd like, and based on more recent designs, I think I'd probably shake up the pedal to drop the background and just have the heron with reflection and ripples. But the swampy feel is fun. The design is UV printed on a lawn green tayda enclosure.
The Build
It's a straightforward build. I really appreciate Dylan159's designs, because the components are all easy to find and they tend to have common values. For this pedal in particular you can probably find all the components already in your stock. Szukalski's layout is also quite nice, and feels a lot like building a PedalPCB pedal. As I said above, it was the gateway drug for me to build self-fabricated PCBs.
I did have one problem: I always test with an Auditorium before boxing, and when I hooked this up I couldn't hear anything. Quite disappointing! I randomly disconnected the GND and SW footswitch pads (I think I saw a hint somewhere on the forum as I was debugging), and it worked fine. Once fully wired it's also fine. I've noticed this on a few of the other Szukalski layouts, but not on any other builds. Not sure why it does this. But then, I don't install or care much about the LED when testing on the Auditorium, so I don't need to hook those up...
The Pedal
I really like this pedal. The pre/gain knobs aren't quite intuitive to me, but by playing around with them, I can get tones that range from a boost, through overdrive, all the way to fuzz. There's a lot of versatility. On the other hand, not every setting sounds good.
It is a bit noisy when both gain and pre are above noon. You can see in my (somewhat messy) gutshot that I ended up using shielded cable, which I'm still getting the hang of. @MichaelW has a good demo here. Szukalski has some good advice about how to use the Blue Sheep here.
Firsts
First PCB build that was fabricatedby JLC
First build from a layout of a PPCB forum member
- First build of a Szukalski/Dylan159 pedal
Pedal rating: 5/5
Attachments
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