walco sustainer

[turing]

i turned up a walco sustainer, one of these reissues i think. cool effect but with a shit load of hiss to go with that amazing sustain.
any bright ideas for taming the hiss? there's a 4.7mic cap coming off the board output which i presume is there to do just that but could be radically improved.
and what about altering the whole thing to be more responsive to bass? i'd like this to be primarily a bass effect after all.
much obliged.

ps. thank god the fount of wisdom is back online

[octafish]

There was a thread with a bunch of suggestions, I'd search "walco chord" or "walco sustainer". I don't think anyone actually did anything but, the ideas seemed sound.

[col]

I had a thread on here about this and I know there have been a few others. The transistors made a big difference to the amount of hiss but while the sustain was incredible I couldn't get rid of the hiss to a useable level and in the end gave up. I still have the board with connections so if anyone does find a solution I can use it but I built Torchy's stripboard dynacomp clone which works well without any hiss. If you look up my old thread I put on which tansistors I used, I can't remember off the top of my head.

Col

[Michael Allen]

Just remember I bought this and like 4 other Walco pedals... I should get around to tracing them sometime..

[jmusser]

Whoever it was that introduced this to the forum a couple months ago, their sound sample didn't seem to have hiss in it. I was very impressed by it.