The Timmy is my favorite overdrive, have had one on more board for at least 10 years. Snagged a v3 from Paul this year which is now the one velcro'd to my board. Such a simple, brilliant pedal.
This weekend I built a pair of them, a Tommy III and a v2 on vero. Vero/v2 is for a friend and his girlfriend handpainted the enclosure, it turned out incredible, will have to commission some more enclosures from her!
While the spaghetti monster that is the vero build is a lot of fun and feels really "handmade", one does really have to appreciate the streamlined simplicity of having PCB mounted pots and the i/o wires in places that make sense.
For fun I compared all of them. No surprise, they don't sound that different. They can all be made to sound pretty dang similar with some tweaking, if you have a band behind you you'd never be able to tell the difference. LM1458 in the clones. The v3 had a JRC4580DD (odd, never heard of that one in a Timmy), and the v1 has JRC4559D in it. Swapped a 1458 in the v3 for my comparison, left the v1 alone.
These setting got them all sounding similar (all set to the symmetrical with the least amount of diodes). Keep in mind the v1 and the hand painted have reverse treble/bass controls. The v3 and Tommy III did sound a bit different with controls in same places, but a little tweaking got them super close. Probably component variance, the real Timmy's have 5% resistors, clones are 1%. Didn't scan the real Timmy circuits to check for any variances, don't care too much. All of them sound like a Timmy, I'd play any one of them.
This weekend I built a pair of them, a Tommy III and a v2 on vero. Vero/v2 is for a friend and his girlfriend handpainted the enclosure, it turned out incredible, will have to commission some more enclosures from her!
While the spaghetti monster that is the vero build is a lot of fun and feels really "handmade", one does really have to appreciate the streamlined simplicity of having PCB mounted pots and the i/o wires in places that make sense.
For fun I compared all of them. No surprise, they don't sound that different. They can all be made to sound pretty dang similar with some tweaking, if you have a band behind you you'd never be able to tell the difference. LM1458 in the clones. The v3 had a JRC4580DD (odd, never heard of that one in a Timmy), and the v1 has JRC4559D in it. Swapped a 1458 in the v3 for my comparison, left the v1 alone.
These setting got them all sounding similar (all set to the symmetrical with the least amount of diodes). Keep in mind the v1 and the hand painted have reverse treble/bass controls. The v3 and Tommy III did sound a bit different with controls in same places, but a little tweaking got them super close. Probably component variance, the real Timmy's have 5% resistors, clones are 1%. Didn't scan the real Timmy circuits to check for any variances, don't care too much. All of them sound like a Timmy, I'd play any one of them.
