Parallel Universe Build Report

[somasix]

Success!  My Parallel Universe from the Dragonfly layout gallery is complete, boxed, and oscillating nicely.

The fuzz by itself is tasteful with a vaguely overdrivey feel to my ears.  It's when you kick on the oscillator that things really get cooking.  As fat, grumbly, and noisy as my aging uncle, but way more streamlined, the oscillator reacts in interesting ways to the fuzz settings (although I start all my fuzz settings at 10 and roll them back from there).  Having the oscillator on really thickens up the sound if you playing by yourself too. 

I'm wondering how much I'll use the gate switch and starve function while using the pedal as a fuzz box.  The starve, as noted before in the forum, gets a little unpredictable.  Around 12 o'clock, my signal drops out completely unless I roll the oscillator knob to about three.  It's when using the Parallel Universe as a noise machine that the starve really seems to come in handy.

I started building the ciruit to this around the same time as I finished the board for my Kay Tremolo.  I figured it looked easy, sounded like it might be cool, and I had everything but the LM386 lying around now.  Except the pots, which cost me a fair amount of money.  Those pots aren't cheap are they?  Having said that, I must be addicted to buying them cause my next project is going to be an ambitious 4ms pedal.  Anyway, wiring them took me a heckuva long time (about two four hour days), but my craftsmanship is better than ever before and all of my bundles of wire are routed and most are zip tied together.  Even then it still looks like a spider egg recently hatched in there.

Here's something I did wrong on every vero ciruit I've done up till now, but was never a problem before.  I assumed from looking at the layouts that I was looking at them from the bottom of the circuit even though the components were plainly visible.  What this means is that every circuit I built was actually a mirror image of the actual layout.  They all worked fine up until this one.  A friend of mine pointed out that because of the way I did the layout, my IC chip, which should have been:

1    5                                4     8
2    6         was actually     3     7
3    7                                2     6
4    8                                1     5

So the pedal didn't work at first.  I had to pry the IC chip out of the socket, solder another socket onto the bottom of the board, and mount the IC chip.  After that it fired right up.  I'll take a polaroid and scan it soon.  My girlfriend's digital camera gave up the ghost, so I'm 100% analog now.

Jason

[nelson]

You can get 50 cent 16mm alpha pots at futurlec

www.futurlec.com

They are PCB mount and have 6mm knurled shafts.

I love this circuit, its good on bass too, has a synth like quality.

[somasix]

Thanks for the info about the pots.  Definitely going to look into those.  I must of spent twelve to fifteen dollars on pots and kick switches, but then look what I got for it, an awesome oscillating fuzz.  Funny, the veroboard, components, and wiring were surplus, free, or salvaged from my first two aborted projects.  Everything around them cost about forty dollars.  Still cheaper than a boutique pedal, and built like a tank to boot.

Sorry it's so little in the image but Polaroids don't seem to do close-ups so well.  My Parallel Universe interacting with a Maestro Rhythm King.  More splat than a pie in the face.  Awesome build!

[Dragonfly]

Success!  My Parallel Universe from the Dragonfly layout gallery is complete, boxed, and oscillating nicely.

The fuzz by itself is tasteful with a vaguely overdrivey feel to my ears.  It's when you kick on the oscillator that things really get cooking.  As fat, grumbly, and noisy as my aging uncle, but way more streamlined, the oscillator reacts in interesting ways to the fuzz settings (although I start all my fuzz settings at 10 and roll them back from there).  Having the oscillator on really thickens up the sound if you playing by yourself too. 

I'm wondering how much I'll use the gate switch and starve function while using the pedal as a fuzz box.  The starve, as noted before in the forum, gets a little unpredictable.  Around 12 o'clock, my signal drops out completely unless I roll the oscillator knob to about three.  It's when using the Parallel Universe as a noise machine that the starve really seems to come in handy.

I started building the ciruit to this around the same time as I finished the board for my Kay Tremolo.  I figured it looked easy, sounded like it might be cool, and I had everything but the LM386 lying around now.  Except the pots, which cost me a fair amount of money.  Those pots aren't cheap are they?  Having said that, I must be addicted to buying them cause my next project is going to be an ambitious 4ms pedal.  Anyway, wiring them took me a heckuva long time (about two four hour days), but my craftsmanship is better than ever before and all of my bundles of wire are routed and most are zip tied together.  Even then it still looks like a spider egg recently hatched in there.

Here's something I did wrong on every vero ciruit I've done up till now, but was never a problem before.  I assumed from looking at the layouts that I was looking at them from the bottom of the circuit even though the components were plainly visible.  What this means is that every circuit I built was actually a mirror image of the actual layout.  They all worked fine up until this one.  A friend of mine pointed out that because of the way I did the layout, my IC chip, which should have been:

1    5                                4     8
2    6         was actually     3     7
3    7                                2     6
4    8                                1     5

So the pedal didn't work at first.  I had to pry the IC chip out of the socket, solder another socket onto the bottom of the board, and mount the IC chip.  After that it fired right up.  I'll take a polaroid and scan it soon.  My girlfriend's digital camera gave up the ghost, so I'm 100% analog now.

Jason

nice !  congrats on another successful build !

and yep...the layouts are shown looking at the "top" (non-copper side) of the board...should make things go smoother from now on !

AC

[reverberation66]

looks good, especially in conjunction with the old maestro.  yeah, PU was one of my first builds, and it's one of my faves, you can get a lot of sound out of such an easy build.   I've got an old roland tr-77 analog drum machine, didn't even think about running it through the PU but I'll have to give that a try...yeah, aron, thanks for the heads up on those cheap alpha pots, that's awesome!!!!  They've got lots of other cool stuff too, all very affordable. 

[nelson]

My name isnt Aron.

[reverberation66]

ok...thanks nelson, got the whole aron/nelson thing flip-flopped in my brain, too many hours staring at schematics...

[somasix]

While we're all around, my girlfriend insists that I build other noisemaking machines that don't necessarily effect guitar signals, like simple oscillators and what not (something I want to do anyway).  I've built one simple squarewave generator from a 555 chip, but didn't really get the range of pitch I wanted out of it.  Of course that could just be the pot too.   You guys got any ideas for some simple tone and noise generating machines?

[tiges_ tendres]

While we're all around, my girlfriend insists that I build other noisemaking machines that don't necessarily effect guitar signals, like simple oscillators and what not (something I want to do anyway).  I've built one simple squarewave generator from a 555 chip, but didn't really get the range of pitch I wanted out of it.  Of course that could just be the pot too.   You guys got any ideas for some simple tone and noise generating machines?

there is a 556 based circuit that can get plenty crazy.  It's based on one of the mini-notebook circuits, and you can find a layout here...

http://compiler.kaustic.net/machines/apc.html

[John Lyons]

I'm curious as to how the Parallel universe sounds.
Any sound clips out there?

John

[somasix]

Thanks for the link tiges tendres (how do I do and underscore again?).  Looks interesting.  Have you built it?  What's a -4db output mean?  I'm sorry because I'm sure a little bit of scratching could get me this info, but I'm in the middle of some fourteen hour work days and my brain is as sputtery and noiseful () as the parallel universe on starve (sorry, I had to).

I've never recorded or posted a sound clip, how do you do it?  When it comes to dancing about architecture, er, I mean verbally describing the way the parallel universe sounds, that's all in my above post.

Anyway, more on self-oscillating noisemakers later, when I have the strength to self-oscillate.

[trevize]

Any sound clips out there?

http://experimentalistsanonymous.com/stuff/paralleluniverse/index.html