Devi Ever Soda Meiser

[alex_spaceman]

Hey everyone,

I have a Soda Meiser populating my breadboard. It does sound absolutely great, ranging from Muff-esque tones to crazy octavey mentalism. Lovely.

It does sound like what I've heard from many a demo on YouTube etc but just wanted to double check a couple things before heating the iron up...

First of all, my main question - it sounds great when playing out loud, but can't clean up at all. Low input level=super gated/misbiased split. Is this normal on a SM or should I give it a check? I couldn't any info about its (in?)ability to clean up so hopefully can get a response from anyone who bought/built it?

And secondly, is there any mod (apart from the VFM transistor flip) you would suggest?

Got the Torn's Peaker in the pipeline to finish off the Shoegazer, really looking forward to have the bad boy boxed up!

Thanks


Ps: schems for the Soda Meiser and Torn's Peaker.
Will vero following Sabro's layouts, cleverly design to be pot mounted.

[slacker]

Yeah, that's what it does when you turn it down, back it off a bit and the fuzz gets less crazy, turn it down more and it gets gated.
Did you try the noise and chaos mods mentioned on the schematic? I didn't find them very interesting, so didn't bother with them, the VFM flip is good though, I put it on a toggle in my build.

[alex_spaceman]

Yes I tried the VFM flip, very cool, high gain octave fuzz. Might be worth making it switchable...

The biggest change Ive done so far though was to replace all the caps (still on the breadboard) from multilayer ceramics to mylar and poly box... only to get a lot of noise, radio and oscillation. Going to re swap them to MLC, was super quiet before.

[PRR]

> can't clean up at all.

The last two transistors are biased DEAD-off. Nothing is going to get through until the signal is HUGE. Back-off, nothing. Fade-out, gate-off.

That's clearly how it is supposed to work.

Is an interesting alternative to clean-loud-FUZZ action. If you want something less IM-polite, try taking signal from the last two transistors' Bases instead of their Collectors. (Might be a good switch.)

[alex_spaceman]

Thanks for the input Paul. Will give it a go to see how it changes the sound.

That said, it is getting weird on my breadboard. I replaced all the caps with the multilayer as I had them on originally... Only for the crazy oscillation not to go away. It's loud and comes through any time I'm not playing. And no, I don't want any oscillation in my pedal!

What could have caused it? Last things I did before it went wrong was flipping the q for VFM andback (no problem at all) and then change the caps to all mylars first and a mix of mylar and poly boxes after. Back to multi layer but not back to the sharp, quiet pedal I had before. What happened in the meantime?!

[wavley]

I've been meaning to dig into my Never Drive, it has started to pick up radio stations in some settings.  I don't use it very often, it's not a very versatile pedal, it's really great at sounding nasty and for gated/broken fuzz sounds though.  I've kicked around selling it, but I kinda like having it around just for the E13 nostalgia and the fact that I really like Devi.  I've always found this pedal to be a bit too loud, hopefully this weekend I'll open mine up and tweak it a little and maybe put it back on my board, I'll let you know how it goes.

[FuzzBuzz]

I know this is an old post, but I'm hopeful somebody out there can help me.  this is only my second pedal build.  My first build solo.  I'm not sure my offboard wiring is correct to the 3PDT footswitch.  would anybody be kind enough to take a look at my photo, and see if they can help?  I get no signal with Bypass on and off!  Thanks!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/12992012@N02/15836000742/in/photostream/

[duck_arse]

the middle lug green wire right of switch, going to the right hand jack, is connected to the sleeve, which will be at ground, and eating all your signal, input or output.

[FuzzBuzz]

well now I'm embarrassed.     Basically need to switch the two wires on my output jack.  Thanks for the second pair of eyes!!

[duck_arse]

if only they was all so easy. does it work now? you can never have too many colours of wire ......

[bluebunny]

you can never have too many colours of wire ......

This is the wiring on the (curvy) backplane of a Cray-1 supercomputer.     

   (<--- click for enlargement)

Apart from one or two anomalous red and green ones, all the interconnecting wires are blue/white striped (corporate colours).  And all hand-wired by the incredible wiring ladies at Chippewa Falls.  This, um, "affectation" continued with the Cray-2 and the XMP.  Gotta love Seymour Cray.   

[duck_arse]

wiring ladies will always say "nah, piece of piss wiring all the same colour", words to that effect, depends where they from.

bench/service/field techs, anybody working on it once the wiring is complete, however, will say other words.

[digitalzombie]

Digging up this old thread since I'm having some issues. I've got one on the breadboard and it's only working slightly when the pre gain is cranked. Here's a couple images of my board layout in case you guys can see something wrong, https://imgur.com/a/HSUqw.

So it's too gated, which leads me to believe something isn't biased correctly, but that's the extent of my knowledge.

Not sure if this is helpful: For whatever reason I seem to be getting a slight voltage reading on the ground track. It was settling around 15mV until I swapped out the wire feeding into the board. Now the track reads about 0.2mV, and 2.2 @ the E of Q1, and 0.7 @ Q2

Can anyone help me understand how to debug this?

[Fndr8875]

DISregard,lol skimmed through your post to quickly, though u were asking how to do VFM mod....I wasnt a big fan of chaos mod, never did the noise floor mod, had my fill on her stuff so doubt ill try it


the pinout on TO-18 package of 2n2907A is BCE not CBE, i might be wrong but think you need to reverse those connections, be easiest to swap the jumpers, or if your gonna solder it go ahead and bend the pins. ive got a shit ton of crappy devi ever vero builds that didnt work, i messed cuts up on etc in a plastic little box lol, i think its the best circuits to start out on bc you can build so many different versions with handful of components that are easily ordered and cheap.

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=83285.0

that is link to the vintage fuzz master mod using dpdt, i did it and was kinda of a bitch to wire, ended up failing after about a month. Easiest way IMO is to use 3pdt toggle and just put mpsa18 on one outter row and 2n2907 on other outside row, and id just go to radio shack and get some T0-19 2n2907s that are plastic , they have the same pinout as mpsa18 CBE.

[digitalzombie]

It's CBE. http://www.taydaelectronics.com/datasheets/A-115.pdf

I had it working months ago, then built one that worked fine. I should have noted how I had it wired up back then but it was a hot mess - I hadn't discovered using jumpers yet, so everything was smashed together.