Rej from Grind Customs suggested I give this Big Muff variant a try and I am so glad i took his advice. This thing is so thick sounding and has some piercing mids if you need them. It seems to cut through any mix I throw at it with ease and sounds great. Do yourself a favor and grab an UltraStoner PCB from Grind Customs FX and populate this thing.

Reverse etch on a 125B enclosure. The artwork is hard to see so I posted another photo at the end of this post. The artwork was a random find on Google Images.

I went with the top mounted jacks just because it worked well with the layout.

 

Here is a better shot of the pedal straight on.

Voltages:
Q1
C 3.9v
B 0.6v
E 0.0v
Q2
C 5.6v
B 0.5v
E 0.0v
Q3
C 3.7v
B 0.6v
E 0.0v
Q4
C 5.2v
B 1.7v
E 1.1v

Finally finished this Cornish SS-2 & G-2 pedal using the Black Horse Effect Duplex Drive PCB. This is a great dual pedal and is NOT just another Big Muff pedal. This thing sound great a low gain and is a very smooth sounding low/mid gain OD/distortion. This is definitely a pedal I will be putting on my board and cherishing. I really love how clean & easy Black Horse Effects PCB is and I can finally retire my very version of the G-2.

Used a play on words and tried to get the same look from a Cornish pedal. The knobs are from Small Bear. The artwork is a reverse etch on a 1590BB enclosure.

Voltages:
Q1
C 9.2v
B 6.0v
E 5.5v
Q2
C 4.7v
B 0.8v
E 0.1v
Q3
C 3.9v
B 0.6v
E 0.0v
Q4
C 4.8v
B 0.7v
E 0.2v
Q5
C 9.3v
B 5.5v
E 5.0v
Q6
C 4.8v
B 0.7v
E 0.2v

LM1458
1 4.7v
2 4.7v
3 4.2v
4 0
5 4.4v
6 4.7v
7 4.7v
8 9.4v

I have been really busy with a few work deadlines and it’s cutting into my bench time. I spent the last few days populating PCBs that have been sitting on the bench way to long. I have some enclosures coming this weekend so I hope to have some etch time with them to get these builds wrapped up.

David Rolo’s Liquid Mercury – Tap Tempo Phaser

David Rolo’s TWIN PEAKS Tap Tempo Harmonic Tremolo

Black Horse Effects’ The Beast (Maxon OD-820 and Klon Centaur in one box)
I still need to get my diodes auditioned and soldered in.

This last weekend I was determined to empty out my “box of fail” builds and try to breath some life into them. Today I decided to try to conquer a Madbean Zero Point SDX (Which is a beast) and I tamed that beast, slayed the dragon or tipped the cow. I got this PCB back in February 2014 and I populated it over a couple of days and then when testing it I was getting nothing but distorted delay repeats. I was very very green in February (now I am just very green) and had no idea where to start troubleshooting. I then revisited it in June thinking “this is the time I get this thing going” but I failed again. I replaced all the PT2399’s and I checked voltages and they looked fine so It went back in the “box of fail”.

Now, today! I set the PCB up on my test rig and got a tone going through it and started tracing out where the distorted repeats start in the circuit. I found the distortion was on pin 8 of IC2 PT2399 (Current control 0) and to my surprise I had a 10nF film cap instead of a 100nF film cap in C15. As soon as I popped in a 100nF cap everything was repeating clean as it should.

On the PT2399 the pin 8 (CC0) and pin 7 (CC1) are for “mod” and “demod”. Now I just need to figure out what they are used for and why did it produce distortion with a 10nf… but for now, ITS WORKING.

An old build sees the light of day and I finally feel like my troubleshooting skills are getting a tiny bit better.

Here is a shot of the PCB. Ever since I moved to the Panasonic film caps, these box caps are hard to look at. lol

This is a GrindCustoms UltraStoner PCB built to TSM680 specs and it sounds great. Has a huge mid boost and just makes this Big Muff variant just pop out. I found with little fiddling around with it and with my Gibson SG I was able to nail many of the great stoner rock and psychedelic bands tones with ease. From Sleep to Red Fang with no problems.

 

Rej suggested that I put this in a multi build with the UltraStoner built to stock… I just may.

Spent an hour this tonight to populate Stomptown Electronics‘ new PCB called the Icky Muff. It’s a combination of two classic pedals in out to achieve some of the great sounds/tone that Jack White got. It’s a MXR Micro Amp boost into a Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi. It sounds great on the test rig and I can see this will be a very usable pedal for sure.

Time to work on some artwork for the enclosure and box this beast up.

I have been sitting on this PCB for some time and finally remembered to buy a CD4047 for it. I finished populating it tonight and ran it for a quick test and fell in love. This is a great sounding chorus and can get that slow whirl lush sound really well. Now comes the hard part, boxing It up.