- Build Rating
I finished this up today: Zorkmid Overdrive, based on the PaulC Zefram Overdrive. (For others building this pedal, this thread has both the BOM and drilling template). I built it exactly per the BOM/silkscreen printed values except for R10, where I used 3k3 instead of 4k7, per the advice from The Man himself in this thread (and great build report). That 3k3 substitution was also mentioned in this great thread.
The enclosure is "Weston Grey" from @StompBoxParts. Those of you that follow my builds may recognize the art work: it's the Guardian from Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I originally used on my Guardian build. I really liked that Guardian pedal, except for the location of the treble and drive controls; I know the intent was to be true to the source pedal (Thorpy Peacekeeper), but it bothered me enough to let the pedal go (some day I might circle back and make my own PCB for it with the controls in the "right" place). Anyway, I really liked the look of my Guardian build, so I recycled it here. (Artwork and labels applied with the Sunnyscopa waterslide decals.)
The knobs are The Skinny from Love My Switches. I bought those on a whim during my last LMS order, I think they look pretty nice. I was going for an "all black" hardware theme, but only had one of the required toggle switches in black. I thought one black and one silver would look bad, and I thought about waiting to complete the build until I had ordered a black toggle, but I gave up and just used the standard chrome switches. I also don't have black washers for the footswitch. Oh well. Still looks decent I think.
The lower/smaller PCB is my custom CMOS inverter-based relay bypass. A while ago, I made a series of custom microcontroller-based relay bypass designs. They work great! But for basic on-off, I prefer this CMOS inverter based design because it's simpler (no MCU programming required) and slightly cheaper. I have through-hole and SMD versions of all designs, but for the CMOS inverter bypass, I had JLCPCB do the SMD assembly.
The pedal worked great on first power-up. So far I haven't spent much time with it, but I can already tell it's going to get more play time - it sounds fantastic. I think "Timmy on steroids" is a reasonable starting description. It's got the (to my ears) fairly neutral EQ ("transparent"), but more "muscle"; definitely its own thing but with familiar DNA. There's a nice sweep to the gain knob, starting in dirty boost/edge-of-breakup territory, to somewhat high(ish) gain. I expect the mid control to be the killer feature here - my initial thought (hope) is that might be the knob that lets you go easily between sounds-good-in-a-band-mix and sounds-good-playing-at-home.
What I found really sounded great was to use the Zorkmid to push my prototype build based on the @Chuck D. Bones-modified Animals Diamond Peak drive. I've seen people in other forums talk about the Skreddy Screwdriver and Timmy pairing well together, so it seems these two talented designers naturally complement each other.
Edit: I used this at band practice last night, and didn't want to turn it off! Playing a Yamaha Revstar with P90s through a Peavey Classic 30, I had the knobs set pretty much where they are in the photo above, and it sounded great. Highly recommended!
The enclosure is "Weston Grey" from @StompBoxParts. Those of you that follow my builds may recognize the art work: it's the Guardian from Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I originally used on my Guardian build. I really liked that Guardian pedal, except for the location of the treble and drive controls; I know the intent was to be true to the source pedal (Thorpy Peacekeeper), but it bothered me enough to let the pedal go (some day I might circle back and make my own PCB for it with the controls in the "right" place). Anyway, I really liked the look of my Guardian build, so I recycled it here. (Artwork and labels applied with the Sunnyscopa waterslide decals.)
The knobs are The Skinny from Love My Switches. I bought those on a whim during my last LMS order, I think they look pretty nice. I was going for an "all black" hardware theme, but only had one of the required toggle switches in black. I thought one black and one silver would look bad, and I thought about waiting to complete the build until I had ordered a black toggle, but I gave up and just used the standard chrome switches. I also don't have black washers for the footswitch. Oh well. Still looks decent I think.
The lower/smaller PCB is my custom CMOS inverter-based relay bypass. A while ago, I made a series of custom microcontroller-based relay bypass designs. They work great! But for basic on-off, I prefer this CMOS inverter based design because it's simpler (no MCU programming required) and slightly cheaper. I have through-hole and SMD versions of all designs, but for the CMOS inverter bypass, I had JLCPCB do the SMD assembly.
The pedal worked great on first power-up. So far I haven't spent much time with it, but I can already tell it's going to get more play time - it sounds fantastic. I think "Timmy on steroids" is a reasonable starting description. It's got the (to my ears) fairly neutral EQ ("transparent"), but more "muscle"; definitely its own thing but with familiar DNA. There's a nice sweep to the gain knob, starting in dirty boost/edge-of-breakup territory, to somewhat high(ish) gain. I expect the mid control to be the killer feature here - my initial thought (hope) is that might be the knob that lets you go easily between sounds-good-in-a-band-mix and sounds-good-playing-at-home.
What I found really sounded great was to use the Zorkmid to push my prototype build based on the @Chuck D. Bones-modified Animals Diamond Peak drive. I've seen people in other forums talk about the Skreddy Screwdriver and Timmy pairing well together, so it seems these two talented designers naturally complement each other.
Edit: I used this at band practice last night, and didn't want to turn it off! Playing a Yamaha Revstar with P90s through a Peavey Classic 30, I had the knobs set pretty much where they are in the photo above, and it sounded great. Highly recommended!
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