What pcb did you buy on a whim and like?

Audandash

Well-known member
Everyone always like to say what pedal they built and where disappointed by how it sounded based on all the hype, I want to take it the other direction. I love to choose a pcb when Robert has a sale that wouldn’t be a normal build for me. For example, my latest was the ocelot octave. Normally this would not be something I would say, “hey, I need that”. I ended up loving it. What have you purchased on a whim and ended up loving? Or even went against the grain where everyone said it’s awful and you loved it. Keep it positive.
 
Circuits that I was not expecting to like as much as I did.

Duo-Phase
Captain Bit
6-band EQ
Closed Circuit Booster Limiter
Son of Ben
Byzantine Flanger
Mean Green Metal Machine
Informant
+1 on the Byzantine. I just got it to do a stacked build and ended up loving it.
 
Cream pie fuzz for me. What an crazy heavy pedal I just bought on a whim

Honorable mention, the Duocast is excellent at knocking pedals off my board.
 
The only pedal that's stayed on my board since building is the Clandestine Preamp, but then I was expecting to like it too. Maybe not quite that much.

The other one that instantly comes to mind is the Moonn Good Vibes, it's modulation and just a handful of components so I thought might as well build it, but it ended up being exactly the kind of light color I like on my clean guitar sounds.
 
The only pedal that's stayed on my board since building is the Clandestine Preamp, but then I was expecting to like it too. Maybe not quite that much.

The other one that instantly comes to mind is the Moonn Good Vibes, it's modulation and just a handful of components so I thought might as well build it, but it ended up being exactly the kind of light color I like on my clean guitar sounds.
Seconded. It's diet modulation but in a good way.
 
The Pro-10 was my biggest surprise. I almost exclusively use the bluesbreaker side with my baritone and it sounds surpringly good with a bass. The ODR side is just solid mid-gain. Antithesis fuzz is a close second-place.
 
I guess you could say all of them were bought on a whim.

The ones I really liked were Chop Shop, Fuzz Aldrin, and Pendulum. I even liked the Kliche more than I thought I would.

The Speaker Cranker was really great too, I did a vero but there's a pedalpcb version.

Some earlier builds that got me into the hobby were the Dod250, the Bluesbreaker, and the Crunchbox--classics that still hold up.
 
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Vemuram Karen. Use an A500K drive pot and leave out the gain trimmer bit and it's just a great overdrive. I was shocked at how much I like it.
 
Vemuram Karen. Use an A500K drive pot and leave out the gain trimmer bit and it's just a great overdrive. I was shocked at how much I like it.

Did you see where @kanengomibako traced a second one and found R5 to be 22K instead of 150K? (Lower gain range)

It also had two functional clipping diodes, where the one I traced (and the first one he traced) had what we suspect was an intentionally broken diode.

In both of ours it looked like someone had crushed the glass diode on purpose (and hidden it under goop).... and comically we both thought we had broken it ourselves removing the goop until one of us just happened to mention it.
 
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MBP Screwdriver (can be built on the PPCB Fuzz Aldrin board). Super versatile and just a great sounding dirt pedal. Also the PPCB Desolate fuzz.
 
The Nutty Fuzz. I saw the expression input and just went with it. Now I use it for noisy shit and run it through the rest of my gain staging setup. The one mod I'd like to investigate is preventing oscillator bleed, which to my super-minimal understanding is frequently a thing with oscillators in a pedal signal chain situation.
 
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