Fingolfen
Well-known member
Since I'm a big David Gilmour fan - I thought it would be fun to make my own combo pedal (though nothing as ambitions as the - I think it was a 5 or 6 pedal combo in one)... and in my defense I was left unsupervised... so there's that...
There are a lot of great resources that catalog the guitars, effects, and amplifiers that David Gilmour used over the years to create his amazing sound. For this particular build, I focused a lot on the information at Gilmourish, and decided to base the pedal off of two of my favorite Gilmour effects - the Colorsound Power Boost and the EHX Big Muff Pi. I have a lot of experience with both of these circuits, and as the two were often used together it made sense to combine the two!
For the boards I decided to go with the new "Thagomizer" board my Ukrainian friend, South Obolon FX laid out. I went with carbon film resistors and modern metal film capacitors. The small value capacitors are all modern MLCC, and the electrolytic capacitors are all modern as well. The transistors, however, are all BC169 and BC184 like I use in all of my power boost build. The components in the charge pump circuit are all, of course, modern.
The Big Muff board is another board that was released by Polish builder LoudCancer as a part of the Ukraine support effort (Steggo has made donations to various agencies in Ukraine to use both of these boards). By and large it's an awesome board, but there is one issue - the potentiometers in their default orientation operate reverse of what you'd expect (i.e. you have to turn the volume knob counterclockwise to increase the effect output). I've used this board before as well in a "Big Mutt Phi" pedal and simply altered the orientation of the potentiometers so they would operate as one would expect.
Like the Power Boost side, I used carbon film resistors (apart from the 47 Ohm resistor in the power circuit), metal film resistors, and modern electrolytic capacitors. There are a few vintage ceramic capacitors, but the diodes are modern 1N914s and the transistors are new production PN5133. The resistor and capacitor set-up for this build follows the pattern of the '73 Ram's Head version of the Big Muff pedal.
Taking two PCBs, laid out in two very different styles, and getting them to come together in one combo pedal took a bit of work. The first thing I had to decide was which pedal went first in the chain - the Power Boost or the BMP? According to Gilmourish, for my favorite period the BMP should come first followed by the Power Boost. That being said, there is evidence that in the early 1970s Gilmour had the Power Boost as the very first pedal in the whole chain (though this appears to be before he started using the BMP when he was still just using the Fuzz Face). In the interest of maximum flexibility, I decided to go with a four jack configuration I first used in my Bi-phase clone. If you just want to run the effect as it, it can be run with a single input and single output cable. However, because each "side" has its own input / output jacks, you can reverse the order, or even add additional effects between the two halves of the combo pedal if desired.
While the end result works flawlessly, the construction process is a little more kludgey than I'd like. Despite adjusting the drill template to accommodate the reversed and hand wired pots on the BMP board, it still sits higher in the enclosure than I'd like, which meant I had to use an open frame jack for the BMP output. If I ever make any more of these, I'm going to adjust the drill template and connection method for those pots.
The rest of the build pretty much follows my standard procedure. I'm using my 3PDT daughter boards, which really come in handy as the allow you to put the LED to either the left or the right of the stomp switch. In this case I'm using purple / pink LEDs (which will make sense once you see the enclosure art). I went ahead and used a fixed current limiting resistor rather than enabling the LED brightness control. As always, the jack connections are insulated with heat shrink tubing.
I decided to have some fun with the enclosure - or maybe a lot of fun with the enclosure. First off, allow me to introduce our dinosaur mascot for this pedal, the Gilmoreosaurus (yes, there is indeed such a thing - though it is spelled a bit differently than our guitarist inspiration). I'd found some neat drawings of the Gilmoreosaurus online that were pinkish in color, and I figured having a Pink Gilmoreosaurus ("... and by the way, which one's Pink???") would be pretty much on the nose for the enclosure art. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to license the art, but another Ukrainian friend (@Estelkatrin on Instagram) came to the rescue and put together an amazing pink Gilmoreosaurus! I added a desert background and a Pink Floyd inspired font, and the rest is history. Of course, I decided I needed to make a "Dark Side of the Steggo" logo to go with the pedal as well.
Honestly I'm really happy with how the pedal turned out - minor construction hiccups notwithstanding. It sounds absolutely great - of course it is a known quantity - a '73 Ram's Head BMP and early configuration Colorsound Power Boost - with the option of reversing the order. I'm going to try and get a tone demo, but using my Stratocaster this combo (with a little added delay) through the clean channel on my Katana (or my Vox AC15 with some adjustment of the knobs) really nails the tone for "Time" - and I'm sure many other Floyd songs of the era - which was the overall goal of the build.
A bit more at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-dark-side-of-steggo-new-gilmour.html
There are a lot of great resources that catalog the guitars, effects, and amplifiers that David Gilmour used over the years to create his amazing sound. For this particular build, I focused a lot on the information at Gilmourish, and decided to base the pedal off of two of my favorite Gilmour effects - the Colorsound Power Boost and the EHX Big Muff Pi. I have a lot of experience with both of these circuits, and as the two were often used together it made sense to combine the two!
For the boards I decided to go with the new "Thagomizer" board my Ukrainian friend, South Obolon FX laid out. I went with carbon film resistors and modern metal film capacitors. The small value capacitors are all modern MLCC, and the electrolytic capacitors are all modern as well. The transistors, however, are all BC169 and BC184 like I use in all of my power boost build. The components in the charge pump circuit are all, of course, modern.
The Big Muff board is another board that was released by Polish builder LoudCancer as a part of the Ukraine support effort (Steggo has made donations to various agencies in Ukraine to use both of these boards). By and large it's an awesome board, but there is one issue - the potentiometers in their default orientation operate reverse of what you'd expect (i.e. you have to turn the volume knob counterclockwise to increase the effect output). I've used this board before as well in a "Big Mutt Phi" pedal and simply altered the orientation of the potentiometers so they would operate as one would expect.
Like the Power Boost side, I used carbon film resistors (apart from the 47 Ohm resistor in the power circuit), metal film resistors, and modern electrolytic capacitors. There are a few vintage ceramic capacitors, but the diodes are modern 1N914s and the transistors are new production PN5133. The resistor and capacitor set-up for this build follows the pattern of the '73 Ram's Head version of the Big Muff pedal.
Taking two PCBs, laid out in two very different styles, and getting them to come together in one combo pedal took a bit of work. The first thing I had to decide was which pedal went first in the chain - the Power Boost or the BMP? According to Gilmourish, for my favorite period the BMP should come first followed by the Power Boost. That being said, there is evidence that in the early 1970s Gilmour had the Power Boost as the very first pedal in the whole chain (though this appears to be before he started using the BMP when he was still just using the Fuzz Face). In the interest of maximum flexibility, I decided to go with a four jack configuration I first used in my Bi-phase clone. If you just want to run the effect as it, it can be run with a single input and single output cable. However, because each "side" has its own input / output jacks, you can reverse the order, or even add additional effects between the two halves of the combo pedal if desired.
While the end result works flawlessly, the construction process is a little more kludgey than I'd like. Despite adjusting the drill template to accommodate the reversed and hand wired pots on the BMP board, it still sits higher in the enclosure than I'd like, which meant I had to use an open frame jack for the BMP output. If I ever make any more of these, I'm going to adjust the drill template and connection method for those pots.
The rest of the build pretty much follows my standard procedure. I'm using my 3PDT daughter boards, which really come in handy as the allow you to put the LED to either the left or the right of the stomp switch. In this case I'm using purple / pink LEDs (which will make sense once you see the enclosure art). I went ahead and used a fixed current limiting resistor rather than enabling the LED brightness control. As always, the jack connections are insulated with heat shrink tubing.
I decided to have some fun with the enclosure - or maybe a lot of fun with the enclosure. First off, allow me to introduce our dinosaur mascot for this pedal, the Gilmoreosaurus (yes, there is indeed such a thing - though it is spelled a bit differently than our guitarist inspiration). I'd found some neat drawings of the Gilmoreosaurus online that were pinkish in color, and I figured having a Pink Gilmoreosaurus ("... and by the way, which one's Pink???") would be pretty much on the nose for the enclosure art. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to license the art, but another Ukrainian friend (@Estelkatrin on Instagram) came to the rescue and put together an amazing pink Gilmoreosaurus! I added a desert background and a Pink Floyd inspired font, and the rest is history. Of course, I decided I needed to make a "Dark Side of the Steggo" logo to go with the pedal as well.
Honestly I'm really happy with how the pedal turned out - minor construction hiccups notwithstanding. It sounds absolutely great - of course it is a known quantity - a '73 Ram's Head BMP and early configuration Colorsound Power Boost - with the option of reversing the order. I'm going to try and get a tone demo, but using my Stratocaster this combo (with a little added delay) through the clean channel on my Katana (or my Vox AC15 with some adjustment of the knobs) really nails the tone for "Time" - and I'm sure many other Floyd songs of the era - which was the overall goal of the build.
A bit more at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-dark-side-of-steggo-new-gilmour.html
