It's Not Only a Boss Clone - It's a Yellow and Blue Pedal

Generally I like to try and compartmentalize my hobbies away from politics. Honestly, I try to compartmentalize a lot of things because in today's world it is far too easy for politics to pervade all topics, all the time, with the maximum possible emphasis. I'm also a graduate / fan of Ohio State University, so to feature the colors yellow (or maize) and blue is a big step in even the worst of times. That being said, the crisis in the Ukraine is as abominable as it is appalling. I sincerely hope the international community finds the political and strategic will to take meaningful action to first return the situation to status quo ante and then continue sanctions against Putin and his oligarchs to weaken their power structure and ability to cause further harm. Therefore in support of the people of the Ukraine, I'm making it a point today to feature a blue and yellow pedal. I wish I could take more meaningful action.

As I'd mentioned in a previous blog entry, I'd been having trouble with one of my Boss pedals, and this is the culprit. AionFX's Sapphire is one of the new Boss pedals released toward the end of last year. Overall I've always had great success with AionFX pedals, with very few not working immediately (and those that didn't work have generally been easy to debug). This one caused me some issues. The first pedal fired up okay (well, at least the light came on), but while I got sound in bypass mode, I got nothing in active mode. I audio probed back to Q4 which seemed to have an issue. Unfortunately in trying to de-solder Q4, the trace broke pretty much ruining the board - so this is take two! The BD-2 is still in production, so stock units can be had for reasonable prices (~$115 new), but building is always cheaper (assuming you don't have to build it twice, but even then...). However, the AionFX project also supports one of the most common modifications of the BD-2 pedal - the Galaxie mod which replaces a lot of the passive components and givens the pedal a different sound and character. I'm planning on building one of those too now that I've got the stock version working!

As you can see from the board above, unlike my Fuzz Friday entry, we're back to a more complex and densely packed PCB. AionFX officially lists this as an "intermediate" build, and given I somehow managed to goof it up once, I believe it! As with many of the more recent Boss pedals, this one originally used the 2SK184-GR JFET, and AionFX offers the identical 2SK209-GR SMD transistor on adaptor boards (as seen on many of my recent Boss pedal builds). This time, however, I decided to go a little further afield and actually sourced genuine through-hole 2SK184-GR transistors. The instructions show how to place authentic Toshiba transistors relative to the silkscreen, and it obviously worked this time!

One of the most interesting aspects of this particular build is, because it supports the Galaxie mod, there are some interesting double-holes in the PCB. The Galaxie mod substitutes a couple of resistors for capacitors and vice versa, so the board has two sets of holes in those locations (see R13, C7, and C8 above for examples) to accommodate the different standard effective lead spacing of 1/4W resistors as compared to most modern film capacitors. I don't think I've ever seen a PCB designed exactly like this in the past, but it is really clever!

The enclosure for my Blues Drive mirrors the original once again - in the original Boss yellow and blue. I have some ideas to make these a little more interesting going forward, but that is going to have to wait for the second wave of Boss pedals (as I pre-ordered a buttload of enclosures for many projects in progress). 

The sound of this pedal is, however, amazing. I can easily understand why it is a very popular pedal and has found its way onto the pedal boards of guitarists like Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), Robert Smith (The Cure), Tom Morello, and even Prince (according to the AionFX description). I'm going to have to compare it in more detail to my Cerulean (Bluesbreaker clone) and Knight of Tone (King of Tone Clone) to see how they compare. Of course, once the Galaxie mod version is finished, I'll need to do the four-way test!