Vanishing Point Built - a couple of questions

[A.J.]

Hi All;

Built the Tone God's Vanishing Point using Nelson's layout (Big Thanks to both!) - made a few changes - added a couple of extra traces to get rid of some of the longer jumpers and re-arranged the ldr portion to match the schematic - oh, also added the trace from emitter to ground that was missing.  Removed the extra footswitch, so it just does step or random.

Found that 100k pots for the controls are a little high - got better results added resistors in parallel to bring them down to about 40K - you can see the led light faintly at lowest setting and seemed to give a bit more control over the range of the effects.

I made both the wah board and the trem board that Nelson included (not the taking wah add-on, though).  Found I had one of those Hamamatsu photocouplers left over from a Neutron - used that so I could have either wah or trem or both together.  It works really well for the wah (add Q control), trem is a little on or off - need to play with that a bit to get more subtlety.

Wish I could figure out how to record a sound sample to post - it's really pretty cool and even the girlfriend doesn't hate it.

Question - random mode adds a lot of noise - a high pitched whine and ticking - makes it pretty useless at this point.  I used shielded wire for almost all of the offboard wiring - there's no bleedthrough and it only happens in random mode, not during step.  The VP board and the wah/trem board have good spatial separation....

Anyone have any thoughts?  I've been thinking of adding some copper board to make a barrier between the two - don't really know, though....

Started a Payback layout last night - that TG is plenty smart.

A.J.

[~arph]

Hi,

I found that lot's of noise is going through the stage wires so keep those as far from your signal line as possible. Also I found that in certain arrangements (like angle to each other) the output has much less hiss/clock noise than in other arrangements.. play around with the orientation.I found this all out just by prodding and pushing around inside my enclosure. Success!

EDIT: Oh and make sure your power supplies for the VP board and effects are properly decoupled/separated!

Arnoud