DOD FX15 build maybe?

[CBGB]

Anyone interested in building a pedal for me? I've been (completely unsuccessfully) looking for one of those old DOD swell pedals, the FX15.

I believe this is a schematic: http://www.dirk-hendrik.com/temp/dod_fx15.pdf

In my mind's eye, it would have a soft switch and would magically fit into a standard enclosure (1290 or whatever)...

Let me know, cheers and all the best!

[mysteriousj]

yesss. this. I wanted to give this a go ages ago but never did. I ended up builing an mxr noise gate with attack/decay mods instead and i love that, although it's not quite perfect it has a few glitches. So i'm keen to see if this is any better, it seems a nice and simple schem. I'll try build one tonight for myself and see how it goes.

[CBGB]

f-a-n-tastic! Love to hear how it turns out. cb

[eatyourguitar]

this looks way simpler than the vintage EH attack decay. pigtronix has a nice attack decay but its out of production. slightly different is the boss slow gear that behringer has a cheap clone of. the slow gear wont do the really long swells though.

[CBGB]

Seems more like a volume pedal in a small enclosure than something in the Slow Gear mold.

[mysteriousj]

bread boarded this thing last night and it kinda worked I might have to do a modification to replace the vactrol but i might just have screwed something up, i'll try sort it out this weekend.

[CBGB]

[CBGB]

Hey mysteriousj,

Were you ever able to get this working at all? Hope life hasn't got in the way too much!

[mysteriousj]

Hey mysteriousj,

Were you ever able to get this working at all? Hope life hasn't got in the way too much!

yeah life got too much in the way I got the audio section working well- but I screwed up the other section, It kinda worked but not quite right. (I put it together really quickly so will be my fault no doubt).

Anyway but I had a better idea lolol. So I started messing around with it using a microcontroller instead for the other section, that way you have a lot more control over the swell, eg. I can make it like a ramp, or any sort of non-linear waveform as well as set the delay and release times. It's still an all analog signal path though a more 21st century way of doing it.

But yeah it'll take a little while to get all that sorted/write code. I just have to wait about a week to get the micro I'm planning to use...

[CBGB]

No worries, life has a habit of making things complicated. Your modernisation sounds pretty intriguing. Will it still fit in a small enclosure do you think?

[mysteriousj]

1590B no problem I reckon.

[CBGB]

No chance of an MXR size box?

In terms of your tweaks, do you mean that - in addition to being able to set the extent/decay/attack of the volume swell/cut that the original does - you hope to make the actual swell/cut itself in the form of a sine-, square-, triangle wave etc? Sort of a weird tremolo volume swell?

Or am I just getting confused?

[mysteriousj]

isn't 1590b an mxr box? at least my dyna comp was pretty much the same?

Yeah, I guess i shouldn't way "waveform" what i mean is the the way it swells. This picture may help:



Where the attack pot controls how long it takes to reach the boost. A sustain pot will control how long it takes until it starts to decay (but maybe it would be better to not have this and instead a second tap triggers the decay.). Lastly a decay pot to control how long it it takes to decay back to the original volume.

So what i mean when I say sine or ramp etc is the way that it swells up to that boosted volume.

It's also possible to do a slow gear type thing if you change the audio section/code.

[CBGB]

Shows what I know I know about enclosures!

As for the rest, it all sounds great

[CBGB]

Hey there mysteriousj, any updates?