Stompin' Time
My little Boss pedalboard, even though it doesn't have a single Boss pedal on it.
Back in the 80's I used to see a lot of guys at GIT carrying these around, but I was at an age where I had to make everything harder than it needed to be and kept lugging rack gear around until I got old and tired.
So I finally decided to give one of these a try. I feel guilty about spending the money to set up this little board, but my Rat clone and Lunar Module clone didn't cost me a fortune to build and the other three pedals weren't horribly expensive. I've had the Heptode for a while. I've built several clones of the Demeter over the last couple of years, but finally decided to buy a, "real" one.
I can get pretty much anything I ever want to hear out of this little board, though. I mean, my vocabulary isn't huge in terms of sounds I use, anyway. So this totally does the trick for me. I was on the fence about the Zero Point until I tried it and then I was all, "Oh, I will not live without that."
Heh...anyway, now I need to stop spending money and earn money for a while so I don't have to keep beating myself up about spending money.
Anyway, that's mah board. It's simple, but I'm not all that complicated my own dang self.
OK, so right to left, there's a Demeter Opto Compulator optical compressor. Very transparent. None of the strangeness in the attack that's typical of a lot of compressors.
Next there's a clone I built of a Skreddy Lunar Module. That's Skreddy's shot at the David Gilmour fuzz sounds from 'Dark Side of the Moon.' It's an amazing circuit, IMO.
Next is what I call my, "Swiss Army Rat." It's a Rat built on the BYOC board, but I built this one with am LM301, which is a little lower-gain that the LM308 that production Rats had. Vintage LM301 op-amps sound really good in this circuit.
There are the six clipping options on this board.
The first three are standard Rat-style clip-to-ground:
#1 Standard symmetric Rat clipping from 2 x 1N4148 diodes.
#2 Turbo Rat clipping from 2 x red LEDs.
#3 Asymmetric (Boss-style) clipping from 1 x 1N4148 on one side and 2 x 1N4001 on the other side.
The second three are in the feedback loop like a Tube Screamer or a Boss OD-1. These give you a kind of Rat-Overdrive that's unique among Rat pedals, as far as I know.
#4 Symmetric clipping from 2 x 1N4148 diodes.
#5 Asymmetric (Boss-style) clipping from 1 x 1N4148 on one side and 2 x 1N4001 on the other side.
#6 MOSFET clipping from 2 x BS1`70 MOSFETs.
If all these options weren't enough, the LM308 depends on a compensation capacitor for its performance. The recommended capacitor is 30-33 pF in the original Rat circuit. The smaller the value, the wider the bandwidth of the op-amp. The higher the value, the more the bandwidth is compressed.
So I put a 33 pF monolithic ceramic capacitor in Position 1. Position 2 is a 56 pF ceramic capacitor. Position 3 is a 100 pF WIMA poly capacitor. Finally in Position 4, I used a 220 pF WIMA poly capacitor.
The effect as you run through them is that the sound is a tiny bit more squashed as you go up. Not a lot, but a little. It actually sounds a little bigger as it gets more squashed, or it seemed to. There's also some change in the midrange at the higher settings. You may never move it from its factory setting, but depending on the amp, the higher settings can sound pretty cool.
So yeah, then there's the Catalinbread Zero Point flanger. The concept is that there are two parallel audio lines going and you slow one down when you step on the switch. So real flanging, like slowing down one tape deck. No regeneration, no LFO...just real flanging. When you release the switch the second line slowly regains sync with the direct signal.
What's super-dope about this is that it's got a fairly bad sync when you aren't stepping on the button. The two lines drift a little relative to each other, giving you a really kind of groovy comb filter effect even when you aren't stomping on the switch.
So you could use this like a chorus-style pedal (doesn't really sound like a chorus, though) and bring in a whoosh of grooviness when you really wanted it. Very hip.
Finally there's the Heptode Virtuoso phaser, which is a slightly updated (buffered) version of the old Maestro Phaser, which is my very favorite modulation effect of all time.
Stompin' Time
My little Boss pedalboard, even though it doesn't have a single Boss pedal on it.
Back in the 80's I used to see a lot of guys at GIT carrying these around, but I was at an age where I had to make everything harder than it needed to be and kept lugging rack gear around until I got old and tired.
So I finally decided to give one of these a try. I feel guilty about spending the money to set up this little board, but my Rat clone and Lunar Module clone didn't cost me a fortune to build and the other three pedals weren't horribly expensive. I've had the Heptode for a while. I've built several clones of the Demeter over the last couple of years, but finally decided to buy a, "real" one.
I can get pretty much anything I ever want to hear out of this little board, though. I mean, my vocabulary isn't huge in terms of sounds I use, anyway. So this totally does the trick for me. I was on the fence about the Zero Point until I tried it and then I was all, "Oh, I will not live without that."
Heh...anyway, now I need to stop spending money and earn money for a while so I don't have to keep beating myself up about spending money.
Anyway, that's mah board. It's simple, but I'm not all that complicated my own dang self.
OK, so right to left, there's a Demeter Opto Compulator optical compressor. Very transparent. None of the strangeness in the attack that's typical of a lot of compressors.
Next there's a clone I built of a Skreddy Lunar Module. That's Skreddy's shot at the David Gilmour fuzz sounds from 'Dark Side of the Moon.' It's an amazing circuit, IMO.
Next is what I call my, "Swiss Army Rat." It's a Rat built on the BYOC board, but I built this one with am LM301, which is a little lower-gain that the LM308 that production Rats had. Vintage LM301 op-amps sound really good in this circuit.
There are the six clipping options on this board.
The first three are standard Rat-style clip-to-ground:
#1 Standard symmetric Rat clipping from 2 x 1N4148 diodes.
#2 Turbo Rat clipping from 2 x red LEDs.
#3 Asymmetric (Boss-style) clipping from 1 x 1N4148 on one side and 2 x 1N4001 on the other side.
The second three are in the feedback loop like a Tube Screamer or a Boss OD-1. These give you a kind of Rat-Overdrive that's unique among Rat pedals, as far as I know.
#4 Symmetric clipping from 2 x 1N4148 diodes.
#5 Asymmetric (Boss-style) clipping from 1 x 1N4148 on one side and 2 x 1N4001 on the other side.
#6 MOSFET clipping from 2 x BS1`70 MOSFETs.
If all these options weren't enough, the LM308 depends on a compensation capacitor for its performance. The recommended capacitor is 30-33 pF in the original Rat circuit. The smaller the value, the wider the bandwidth of the op-amp. The higher the value, the more the bandwidth is compressed.
So I put a 33 pF monolithic ceramic capacitor in Position 1. Position 2 is a 56 pF ceramic capacitor. Position 3 is a 100 pF WIMA poly capacitor. Finally in Position 4, I used a 220 pF WIMA poly capacitor.
The effect as you run through them is that the sound is a tiny bit more squashed as you go up. Not a lot, but a little. It actually sounds a little bigger as it gets more squashed, or it seemed to. There's also some change in the midrange at the higher settings. You may never move it from its factory setting, but depending on the amp, the higher settings can sound pretty cool.
So yeah, then there's the Catalinbread Zero Point flanger. The concept is that there are two parallel audio lines going and you slow one down when you step on the switch. So real flanging, like slowing down one tape deck. No regeneration, no LFO...just real flanging. When you release the switch the second line slowly regains sync with the direct signal.
What's super-dope about this is that it's got a fairly bad sync when you aren't stepping on the button. The two lines drift a little relative to each other, giving you a really kind of groovy comb filter effect even when you aren't stomping on the switch.
So you could use this like a chorus-style pedal (doesn't really sound like a chorus, though) and bring in a whoosh of grooviness when you really wanted it. Very hip.
Finally there's the Heptode Virtuoso phaser, which is a slightly updated (buffered) version of the old Maestro Phaser, which is my very favorite modulation effect of all time.