by mark.price » 19 Nov 2016, 01:39
Timko of Kansas City Missouri has this build report on the Frog Tube Preamp PCB, on the madbeanpedals.com forum:
Now that cooler temperatures and shorter days are here, I've found myself getting back in the building game. This was my first preamp pedal, and I only managed to shock myself once! This is Mark Price's Frog Preamp, based on the Alembic F2B, which is based on the preamp section of the late 60's Fender Dual Showman. It's got tons of volume, as well options for added brightness, less brightness, and clipping. I have settled on one set of clipping diodes, the 1N270 (often used in peoples Klon Klones). I'm still trying out the 2nd set of diodes. It's got a traditional Fender tone stack, which seems to match my main Ampeg Rocket really well. There's no footswitch as this is something I have sitting on top of my amp in an always on setup.
The name comes from a 5.0ish earthquake that I felt in my office while I was building it. The earthquake originated in Oklahoma, most certainly due to fracking.
This is a remarkably simple build when comparing it to some of the other monsterous delays and modulation pedals I've built. You need to make sure you order the right components, but once that's done, you can get it put together in a short amount of time. However, I'll give people the advice to cut the flat parts off the bottom of the tone stack pots because they could potentially ground out the capacitors in the tone stack due to the circuit layout. I had this problem, and spent a couple of days debugging it. You may also have to cut down the heat sinks to make it fit (I had to cut the fins off the one I had in there), but they'll still dissipate heat enough to function.
The graphics turned out all right, but I messed up and put the control text too close to the knobs. Aside from that small detail, I'm really happy with the way it turned out. At some point in the future I am going to create a dual preamp pedal (more in the spirit of the Alembic) with a way to jump the channels. I may also remove the mids tone pot from the chain, setting it to a fixed value.
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