Updating the Electric Mistress - No Send / Receive Loop Mod

Last week I posted an entry detailing my EHX Electric Mistress build based on the PCB Guitar Mania Electric Lover PCB. Overall I was pretty happy with the build, but I had noticed something a little unusual when I began the calibration process. In my first entry I mentioned having to crank the bias trimmer quite a bit to get a good tone (or any tone at all for that matter). On the PCB Guitar Mania Facebook group, another user posted that he was having a similar issue with his build, although his was apparently bad enough to where he couldn't get a reasonable calibration. Fortunately the long-time board users had a fix for him, and since I'd had a similar issue in my base-build, I decided to take a deep breath, pull the PCB out of the enclosure and try the fix on mine as well. 

A Doppelganger Doppelgänger - Building Aion FX's Quadratron

The Lovetone Doppelganger is a four stage optical phaser pedal with a huge number of tone options. Once again, this is currently a very expensive pedal, with examples going on Reverb north of $1000. However, Aion FX offers a version which you can build for a fraction of the cost of the original, though it is a challenging build! As you can see below, the PCB itself is vary large, though it isn't packed as tightly as some other manufacturers' offerings are. As this is a fairly complex build, I'm actually going to go through the process step by step rather than glossing over some of the more gory details.

The Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress Flanger / Chorus

I'll be completely honest, I'm not a great guitar player at this point. I'm somewhere in the "intermediate" range, but I'm having a huge amount of fun learning not only guitar technique but chasing great sounds. One of the songs I've always loved is Rush's "Natural Science," and the flange effects at the beginning of it really do a lot to set the tone and mood of the piece. While no one seems to have a definitive answer (apart from Alex Lifeson, who apparently hasn't discussed / disclosed what hardware was used), the consensus is that he used an EHX Electric Mistress on the album Permanent Waves - especially on "The Spirit of Radio" (another song I need to learn...). As I'm on a massive pedal-building kick, and given one of my other guitar heroes David Gilmour also used one, I decided to build my own EHX Electric Mistress using PCB Guitar Mania's Electric Lover Flanger PCB.