A Nightmare on Echo Street - PCB Guitar Mania's Echo Dream Clone

So this particular build has to rank up there with the absolute weirdest pedals I've ever put together and played, and it can be a real wolf in sheep's clothing depending on how you set the controls! Based on the Death by Audio Echo Dream 2, PCB Guitar Mania's Echo Nightmare PCB (available in trough-hole or SMD formats) is a pretty faithful adaptation of the original based on my playtesting so far. You're able to get a huge variety of tones and delay times with the pedal, and add fuzz. You can even kill the dry signal and only hear repeats if that's your jam (though I'm still struggling to understand an application for that functionality in anything outside extremely experimental music!). 

As PCB Mania boards go, the Echo Nightmare isn't as tightly packed as many are, so the build is a little easier in that respect. Most of the heavy lifting is done by the XR2206P chip (the 16 pin IC in the upper left of the PCB). For this particular build I pretty much used all modern metal film resistors and film capacitors. The only oddball choice I made was I used an older 470pF Panasonic film capacitor rather than an MLCC one for C2 (visible just to the left of the lower of the two center mounted 8-pin ICs). 

The enclosure is a 1590BB which gives you a bit more interior space to work with than a standard 1590B. As the PCB isn't huge, there was plenty of room to work with, though once again the sheer number of potentiometers, board mounted LED, and two toggle switches made final alignment more challenging that I'd hoped.

For the enclosure, I have been on a kick of trying to replicate, or at least pay homage to, the original enclosures on several recent project (like my Colorsound Overdriver clone and my Boss pedal clones). This one sort of falls into the same category. I went online to try and find fonts similar to what was used on the original Echo Dream II and adapt the art on the original pedal for the 1590 series enclosure (though of course I replaced the "Death by Audio" brand name with "Audio by Steggo" - I considered going with "Death by Steggo", but that didn't seem right for Steggo's idiom). 

Of course, in my zeal to replicate the design of the original I failed to notice that the Echo Nightmare swaps the position of the Speed and Depth knobs. Not to worry - I just wired those two potentiometers separately rather than soldering them directly to the board! Overall I'm really happy with the result. It isn't as whimsical as many of my other designs, but I enjoyed the challenge. It also let me practice some new techniques in Illustrator that will become more important on some really cool future projects (watch this space!).

With new original examples running about $280 (US), this is yet another great clone opportunity from an economic standpoint. I'm undecided whether or not some of the more unusual functions make this a situational / boutique pedal or if it is more universal because it can be dialed back to provide some fairly conventional delays leaving the player free to add the insanity when needed. I'm going to have to play with it more to decide. The only problem I've encountered so far is you have to be careful with some of the settings because you can get runaway infinite repeats if you're not careful. I'm not sure whether this is because there isn't an internal bias trimmer (like on my Vector project from last year) or if this is just a pedal that you have to watch the settings because some combinations just don't work (like a ZVEX Fuzz Factory).