Catalinbread Pareidolia help needed

[Kimster]

Hi!

I just finished building a Catalinbread Pareidolia based on a vero layout from Sabrotone www.sabrotone.com/?p=2528
It works just fine, but it is very sensitive for what comes after it in the chain. If I put anything between it and my amplifier (classic 30) then it gets very bright and harsh. It also feels like there is a volume raise. I also tried putting a buffer after it, but it results in the same thing. It sounds best if it is the last pedal in the chain, but still it is a little bright. When searching on the net after solutions I found out that the early units from Catalinbread had this issue and that makes me think that the vero layout is from an old unit. Catalinbread has made a fix for this but I don´t know what they did and I don´t know how to find a solution for this. Anyone got any ideas?

Kimster

[roseblood11]

That's interesting! I always said that my clone (same layout as yours) doesn't sound exactly like the pedals in some youtube demos. I think the sweep is too wide, the treble side is too bright and the bass side is too low/muddy. Even if I use a similar setup as in Catalinbreads demos (Strat or Les Paul, Pareidolia, modded Blues Jr (similar to their Princeton Reverb), it doesn't sound 100% correct. The treble side of the sweep is too harsh and the bass side causes the amp to distort even if it's set to a totally clean sound.

[Kimster]

Hi again!

I checked the layout again and found one odd thing. It is the wiring to the vol pot. It says to connect the output from the circuit to lug 2 and the output from the pedal to lug 3. I changed this and it made a huge difference. I also added a 1nF cap over leg 1 and 3 to get rid of some of the harshness and now it plays really nice. Check if your pedal (Roseblood11) is wired the same way.

[dulcetpine]

Alright, this is driving me nuts.

My first attempt at this build didn't work properly- though everything lit up nice but it was overly harsh and had no depth. I also had odd voltage readings and decided to cut a new vero board and start from scratch. In doing so I decided to de-solder all the components from the previous build and test them individually to see if I could find a faulty component and all I found was that I had an extra 1M resistor in there on one too few 10K resistors... so I figured that was the cause of my issues and the reason why I couldn't find what was wrong at first glance.

Now the pedal is working great but the LED's do not light up. I can't figure out why and maybe I am having a brain fart but by all indication they SHOULD work because I get fluctuating voltage readings from 1v-4v with speed intervals that vary with the Rate pot. My first thought is that this could be a grounding issue with the footswitch... any other thoughts? (Note that I verified all components and solder points as accurate and hot).  I am using two 5mm LED's with the (-) of LED 1 > (-) LED 2 > Footswitch.  When I built this the first time the LED's worked perfectly with this arrangement.

I really want to get this puppy on my board.