Small Clone (clone) finished

[Calamardo]

Hello! I just want to say thanks to all at this forum (especially to Francisco Peña for the great pcb, Moosapotamus and Mark Hammer for help me to choose the mods).
Here is the report: I used the layout from Tonepad.com and the fx sound is amazing to my ears, is warm and with the mods that i made very versatile. Only one complaint: i can hear a little background noise. I use bc549 transistor for the 2n5088, and i wonder if using the 2n5088 can i reduce the noise, any idea?. The other componentes are the specificated in the layout. The mods that i made are:
1) depth pot mod with a 10kb pot, like is shown in the last revision of the layout
2) Switcable Pitch Shift caps (see more in Moosapotamus.com): 33pf, 47pf, 100pf, 150pf and 330pf. About the 330pf IMO make more background noise but no clock noise.
3) Switchable 2,2uf and 4,7uf for lfo speed. Using the 47pf (pitch shift) with the 4,7uf the fx sounded like Flanger! but without feedback (THANKS MARK HAMMER!!!!! for your help).
Ok, thats all (so sorry for my English) and Thankssss again!

[H.Manback]

Yup that big cap on the cd4007 makes it real noisy, I have the same problem. My biggest is 330n too.

The 2.2µF and 4.7µF switch in LFO speed range I assume, with the 4.7 making it more than twice as slow? Maybe I'll try that one too, but I think I like the mellow setting as it is already. Besides, I'll have like 5 knobs and 2 switches :shock:, a bit too much :wink:

[Mark Hammer]

I was working on mine briefly yesterday.  The board has been populated but not really installed into anything for a while.  For my mods, I added a variable width control, variable wet-level control to move the effect a little more into the background, a chorus/vibrato switch, slow/fast switch for the LFO (and "fast" means audio-frequency modulation for quasi ring-modulation sounds) and a low-cut switch.  Although everything else seems to be working fine, the LFO is temporarily not working, so I can't verify all added mods.  However, if I swish the depth pot around, I can hear some change in the clocking of the delay and a sort of "manual" chorus effect.

I find the low-cut to be a nice addition that softens the chorus sound in a pleasing way. Essentially, what it amounts to is changing the 1uf cap after Q2 for a much smaller value.  In my case, I change it to .01uf.  While that sounds like a huge change, consider that the original cap is probably a much larger value than it needs to, passing low frequency content that probably isn't in your guitar signal anyways.  Feel free to experiment with other values, but .01uf is a reasonable place to start.

With the low cut, the wet signal and chorus effect is restricted to mids and above.  It is still an evident effect, but just sounds a bit less boxey and a little more refined.  Not better or worse, just another flavour.  In particular, I imagine if one plays around with clock-cap values larger than the stock 150pf value, a low-cut function may come in quite handy for keeping the sound less boxey.

I suppose the simplest way to implement it is to have the two cap choices in series, and wire up a SPDT toggle to shunt one cap in one position and the other cap in the other position.  That will reduce pops from switching.

[H.Manback]

Sounds interesting. I did a wet/dry mix as well, and I did a seperate one for each output. Now all I need is a second amp :lol:.

One thing though, doesn't the low cut mod murder the effect a chorus has on natural harmonics? Since you made it switchable, it won't be a problem really, but this just came to mind.

[Calamardo]

Thanks you guys for the replies!