I finally got around to building one a little while back. I prefer having the gain lower than what I imagine the average (metal playing) user might go for, and I built this to the Tight Rock specs.richard44 wrote:I have not yet tried running this at 18V, but James Brown in his demo showed it gave the pedal a more expansive, less compressed sound. Apropos to that, if I had to build this pedal again, I might add a 18V/9V switch with a voltage double in the circuit.
When used in this way, I think the higher voltage is almost a necessity, because it seems to eliminate unpleasant higher order harmonics (that seem to be coming from the op amps themselves). For super heavy distortion, I don't think there's an obvious advantage to anything higher than 9V - you'd really only need it for playing stuff that had a big dynamic range.
It really does seem to be a cool pedal. My only complaint is that when I roll down my guitar's volume, it sounds like a sitar, or like there is a biasing issue. I wouldn't be surprised if I had a minor error in my build, but it would have to be minor, because the pedal sounds great otherwise, and I only run it at 18V with the gain low. And since the gain is never set high, I was able to remove the gate altogether.