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. 

This is not an easy or trivial build. There are a lot of resistors and capacitors tightly packed together, and even when you build the thing correctly, you still have to go through the calibration process. This version of the PCB also appears to be set up to where you could use a couple of different DC voltages, so I had to make some serious adjustments to the Bias to get a good tone. However, once I got that tone - oh wow!

I spent a fair amount of time identifying the right components for this build. While most of the major components (resistors, capacitor, and hardware) are all from Mouser, the diodes are all NOS from Pedalhacker. I ended installed them at angles because the PCB was a bit tight (and I didn't want to take a chance on damaging them). I also sourced the JRC4558 chips from Pedalhacker as well. I used a Guitar PCB Mania 3PDT board to make connecting the stomp switch and PCB easier. I'll have to verify where all of the rest of the integrated circuits came from as some were from Mouser, but a few were from alternate sources.

Although the photo isn't great (my main PC with Photoshop is... well... that's another story. Don't get me started on defective high-end video cards at this point), I decided to have some fun with the enclosure and add everyone's favorite Female AI Cortana (as she appeared in Halo 4 I believe) to the front of the enclosure. While they aren't on, the LEDs are, of course, blue as well! 

I still may fiddle with the calibration a bit more, but at this point I'm getting great tone out of the pedal. Using a Les Paul I'm able to actually get the sound from "Natural Science" pretty well nailed, and with a few weeks' practice, I may even achieve marginal competence on the song and post a blog update with sound!