DEMO TweedMan (Catlinbread Formula 5F6) - Demo Added

This post contains an audio or video demo

MichaelW

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Here's another one I buttoned up yesterday.

This is Catlinbread's take on a Tweed Bassman.

Coming from a completely different direction than the Sole Proprietor (HAO Sole Pressure) which only has 2 controls. The Tweedman has 6 controls (counting the internal Presence Trimmer).

At some of the cleaner settings the two pedals have the same vibe going on. Big bold clean sounds.
But at higher gain settings, the Tweedman goes a lot further. There's even a "turbo" mode or something that kicks it into high gain (but not like a Marshall like you'd expect).

The recommended starting point for the internal presence trimmer is halfway but I found the presence too high and a bit piercing. After messing with it a bit I wound up setting it to just barely cracked.

The external "Treble" control works kind of interactively with the internal presence trimmer, I've given some thought to adding another Pot and exposing the trimmer as a knob. The treble control seems to control the high mid range where the "mid" control covers the lower mids.

Lots of low end presence on this pedal and I think it would probably work great on bass too!

Again, I'll try to get a demo up a bit later, but very cool pedal. I like both the Sole and Tweedman, they "kinda" cover the same ground as a clean-ish preamp but have different voices once you start cranking up the gain.

The build went super smooth, for some reason it LOOKS like a lot more components than it really is. Having all the resistors lined up in a row made quick work of populating it.

Excuse the dog hair on the pic, there's little white hairs everywhere around here heh.....

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Ok adding a demo here.

I'm really digging this pedal. Couple of different ways to use it.

1. Is as a clean pre-amp. It gives you a taste of that Tweed Bassman/JTM45-ish kind of platform that you can stack overdrives on top of.
In the video I'm kicking on a couple of different drives into the clean setting. (Boss OD-1, Boss-SD1, Providence SOV2, and Carmine overdrive)

2. As a "crunch" chording kind of sound. With a real amp you'd be blowing the doors off to get that level of gain out of a Bassman
3. Full on heavy overdrive in the "Turbo" setting. This can't be done with a Tweed Bassman and is a flight of fancy from Catlinbread. But it's still pretty cool.

I also compared it to the HAO Sole Pressure (Sole Proprietor) that is supposed to do the same Tweed Bassman thing. At the clean settings they both sound similar although the Tweedman has a lot more low end. Once you start cranking up the gain they diverge but both sound pretty cool. I'd say the Tweedman is probably the more authentic of the two when it comes to a cranked Tweed Bassman sound.

 
One among my favorite PPCB builds. I often use it to restore some low ends to the guitar signal. Even with Bass control set before 12' it's quite effective.

I tend to set the High control around 12' or lower, and the Presence control in the second half of its rotation. I used an extra pot on my build (under the toggle) because I mostly use this control to shape the signal.

This circuit sounds very good on its own, and really at its best when used as a preamp, to add some color and shape the tone from an other drive.

On this build there are smd transistors. It can be useful to use sockets, in my experience. You can get a lot of interesting results if you try various FET transistors in there. 2SK117 are good and sligthly different, for exemple.

Edit : I know you've built a lot of them, so I wonder which ones are your favorites, so far, among PPCB overdrive/preamp circuits ?
 
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I'm building my enclosure for this one right now. I really like this circuit!
If you scoop the mid and put it in hi gain mode, you can really here the relationship between tweed bassman and marshall jtm45. I feel like this pedal takes a clean fender silverface amp and gets it right in the tweed zone.
Im waiting on some graphics for the final touch and then I'll do a build report as well.
Great Demo Michael!
 
Where would a guy find the 4393 FET's? This build intrigues me!! And I thought I was all done building with the Thermionic Deluxe I just finished. I know Aion has them, but a $5.00 order? That's pretty chintzy. Maybe Kevin has a few more parts I could use. Thanks, Bob
 
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