Abra Kadabra! It's a Sabbra Cadabra Clone!

I'd originally intended to post another Boss project today, but I've had a very uncharacteristic failure to function issue with a Boss / AionFX build. I'm still working on that debug off and on, but in the meantime here's another pedal that I recently finished up. I'm hoping to get back to the Boss builds later in the week and get the dead one debugged.

Distortion pedals are a staple of rock pedal boards everywhere, and there are tons of options both vintage and modern to help the player get whatever particular sound they're looking for. This particular project is a clone of the Catalinbread Sabbra Cadabra, which helps the player capture Tony Iommi's tone in a convenient 125B-sized box. Originally released in 2014, the pedal is still in production and isn't terribly expensive. However, you can file this one in the "it's cheaper to build" - at least a bit - category. For this build I used the AionFX Ceres project board and original MPF4393 transistors purchased directly from AionFX. 

As you can see from the PCB picture above, this build is a bit different. Rather than the normal bypass board that came with the PCB, I decided to upgrade this pedal with the 18V bypass module also available from AionFX. I ended up having to use a couple of film capacitors on the board because I was out of MLCC capacitors in the correct value. Overall the build is fairly simple. You have the option of using electrolytic or film capacitors in a couple of spots, I went with electrolytics, but in the final analysis I might should have opted for films because the "noise floor" (read, distortion hiss) is a little higher than I'd like for this pedal. Easily fixable with a noise gate, but built in this configuration it's more of a must have than nice to have.

For the enclosure, well... I decided to have a little fun. Since this pedal gives you the tone of a metal icon, I didn't figure "Abra Kadabra" or even the original "Sabbra Cadabra" really cut it, so I went with the darker Harry Potter reference. I even used a yellow-green LED on it, so the pedal looks absolutely killer. Noise issues aside (which could be a result of giving it 18V rather than 9V and using electrolytic capacitors rather than film in a couple of spots), the sound is great! It really gives you that early Black Sabbath sound in a single pedal.