rwl
Well-known member
- Build Rating
This is a report on my build of the PPCB War Scythe, based on the EQD Hoof Reaper. This is one of my favorite pedal designs, and favorite pedals overall.
Inspiration
I got into pedals around last May, and one of the first pedals that caught my attention was the Hoof Reaper. I think it was mentioned on the guitarpedals subreddit, which seems to really like EQD pedals. Then when I tried some pedals in my local guitar store, I noticed that they had one. When I first found out about PPCB and saw the PCB (I think browsing top sellers), it stuck out as an "advanced" build: a huge PCB and some obscure parts. Point is, building this was on my mind for a while.
I wasn't sure what bird to choose for the enclosure. I needed something suitably metal and memorable. I built this and had it on my pedalboard in a plain enclosure for probably 9 months. Then my girlfriend and I were out birding at the end of last year and we were looking for a big milestone - trying to hit the 700th species in our life list (bird nerds record all their sightings and have a "life list" of all the species they've seen). My gf does most of the IDing and tracks all our sightings on ebird, while I try to take photographs. It's remarkable to think that we've seen so many species. Last year we saw a lot - I visited Panama for work - and she gets excited about some of the milestone numbers. We were really close to 700 at the end of the year. Anyway, we were out in the Skagit valley in late fall, and we were walking around one of our favorite sites - a big estuary and swamp - when a little white bird caught my eye. I thought it might be a snow bunting, but with my camera and her binoculars she IDed it as a Northern Shrike. This was our 700th species, and I couldn't have picked a better one.
Shrikes are absolutely metal. They're little songbirds and mostly don't look distinctive (besides a slightly hooked beak), but they're known for impaling prey on spikes - that could be cacti, thorns, or barbed wire. This is to cache the prey for later.There are few birds more metal than that, and it's earned them the nickname "butcherbird" (I think there might be other totally "butcherbirds" in other places). I think shrikes are more common or visible in the Southwest, where they're likely to cache lizards, but the Northern Shrike lives across much of Canada and the northern US.
So I had the bird, and I liked the name for the pedal - butcherbird! But I was still missing the design. Well, if I wanted to lean into metal, why not a Sabbath-inspired pedal? I decided to do a version of the iconic Master of Reality album cover, but with the shrike on it.
I'm very happy with the result. It's one of my very favorite designs. There's two small things that irk me - the mouse should probably be bigger to get the scale right (but I didn't really want the focus of the pedal to be a dead mouse), and the pedal is printed on a glossy black. I could have sworn I selected matte black for the color on Tayda, rather than gloss. Getting a clean photograph of the front was tough since the gloss black is so reflective.
The Build
This was a bit of a painful build, but not because of the PCB or build itself. Instead, I really built up the component selection in my head. This was in the first batch of PCBs that I built, and it was before I realized you could swap out many "mojo" components without ill effect. So I agonized for a long time about the AC176 and 2N1308 transistors. Plus, should I build the cleft mod, or the stock version? I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I wanted to spend so much for a transistor on ebay.
With these 1590XX builds (also the Parentheses), Robert has done a great job lining up components and there's something really satisfying about going down a row of 40 resistors at once, without any interleaved legs or having to reposition the board.
While the board looks imposing, it's really not that many components, and if it weren't for the three footswitches and all the controls, this seems like it would fit into a 1590BB. I built the pedal a while ago and rehoused it recently, so the guts are a little messer than I'd like.
The Pedal
I love it. I really like the sound of tone benders and muffs, and this has both together. And I like having an octave fuzz on a footswitch in another pedal, without needing the space of a full enclosure for it alone. I think the one drawback is that I rarely run all three effects together, since it feels pretty noisy. Maybe it's just me imagining the mojo diodes, but I think the tone of both the muff side and the tone bender side is fairly distinctive. At least compared to some silicon tone benders (e.g. the Dung Beetle - also one of my favorite pedals - this sounds unique). Likewise, I find the muff pretty distinctive. I have a Muffin Factory, and this one sounds fairly unique; maybe I need to explore all 5 million combinations of settings on the Muffin Factory...
The natural point of comparison for this pedal is the Parentheses (EQD Life) pedal, the other popular EQD three-in-one pedal. I've built that one as well, although it's in a plain enclosure. I much prefer the War Scythe sound - which is more of a classic rock/bluesy sound than a modern metal tone. I think I'm in the minority based on the production status of both and the amount of attention the Parentheses gets.
Firsts
Pedal rating: 5/5
Inspiration
I got into pedals around last May, and one of the first pedals that caught my attention was the Hoof Reaper. I think it was mentioned on the guitarpedals subreddit, which seems to really like EQD pedals. Then when I tried some pedals in my local guitar store, I noticed that they had one. When I first found out about PPCB and saw the PCB (I think browsing top sellers), it stuck out as an "advanced" build: a huge PCB and some obscure parts. Point is, building this was on my mind for a while.
I wasn't sure what bird to choose for the enclosure. I needed something suitably metal and memorable. I built this and had it on my pedalboard in a plain enclosure for probably 9 months. Then my girlfriend and I were out birding at the end of last year and we were looking for a big milestone - trying to hit the 700th species in our life list (bird nerds record all their sightings and have a "life list" of all the species they've seen). My gf does most of the IDing and tracks all our sightings on ebird, while I try to take photographs. It's remarkable to think that we've seen so many species. Last year we saw a lot - I visited Panama for work - and she gets excited about some of the milestone numbers. We were really close to 700 at the end of the year. Anyway, we were out in the Skagit valley in late fall, and we were walking around one of our favorite sites - a big estuary and swamp - when a little white bird caught my eye. I thought it might be a snow bunting, but with my camera and her binoculars she IDed it as a Northern Shrike. This was our 700th species, and I couldn't have picked a better one.
Shrikes are absolutely metal. They're little songbirds and mostly don't look distinctive (besides a slightly hooked beak), but they're known for impaling prey on spikes - that could be cacti, thorns, or barbed wire. This is to cache the prey for later.There are few birds more metal than that, and it's earned them the nickname "butcherbird" (I think there might be other totally "butcherbirds" in other places). I think shrikes are more common or visible in the Southwest, where they're likely to cache lizards, but the Northern Shrike lives across much of Canada and the northern US.
So I had the bird, and I liked the name for the pedal - butcherbird! But I was still missing the design. Well, if I wanted to lean into metal, why not a Sabbath-inspired pedal? I decided to do a version of the iconic Master of Reality album cover, but with the shrike on it.
I'm very happy with the result. It's one of my very favorite designs. There's two small things that irk me - the mouse should probably be bigger to get the scale right (but I didn't really want the focus of the pedal to be a dead mouse), and the pedal is printed on a glossy black. I could have sworn I selected matte black for the color on Tayda, rather than gloss. Getting a clean photograph of the front was tough since the gloss black is so reflective.
The Build
This was a bit of a painful build, but not because of the PCB or build itself. Instead, I really built up the component selection in my head. This was in the first batch of PCBs that I built, and it was before I realized you could swap out many "mojo" components without ill effect. So I agonized for a long time about the AC176 and 2N1308 transistors. Plus, should I build the cleft mod, or the stock version? I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I wanted to spend so much for a transistor on ebay.
With these 1590XX builds (also the Parentheses), Robert has done a great job lining up components and there's something really satisfying about going down a row of 40 resistors at once, without any interleaved legs or having to reposition the board.
While the board looks imposing, it's really not that many components, and if it weren't for the three footswitches and all the controls, this seems like it would fit into a 1590BB. I built the pedal a while ago and rehoused it recently, so the guts are a little messer than I'd like.
The Pedal
I love it. I really like the sound of tone benders and muffs, and this has both together. And I like having an octave fuzz on a footswitch in another pedal, without needing the space of a full enclosure for it alone. I think the one drawback is that I rarely run all three effects together, since it feels pretty noisy. Maybe it's just me imagining the mojo diodes, but I think the tone of both the muff side and the tone bender side is fairly distinctive. At least compared to some silicon tone benders (e.g. the Dung Beetle - also one of my favorite pedals - this sounds unique). Likewise, I find the muff pretty distinctive. I have a Muffin Factory, and this one sounds fairly unique; maybe I need to explore all 5 million combinations of settings on the Muffin Factory...
The natural point of comparison for this pedal is the Parentheses (EQD Life) pedal, the other popular EQD three-in-one pedal. I've built that one as well, although it's in a plain enclosure. I much prefer the War Scythe sound - which is more of a classic rock/bluesy sound than a modern metal tone. I think I'm in the minority based on the production status of both and the amount of attention the Parentheses gets.
Firsts
First pedal design based on an album cover
First triple pedal
Pedal rating: 5/5
