Set Phasers to Stun! The Boss PH-1r

In November of last year, AionFX announced six new boards based on classic Boss pedals - with four of the six never having appeared as a DIY PCB before. Needless to say I picked up the whole set. In addition to the new PCBs, AionFX also offered special JFET sets which would facilitate building these pedals, as in many cases the circuits required JFETs no longer available in anything but SMD form. The PCB boards themselves support adding an SMD if you're up to it, or you can buy pre-soldered SMDs from AionFX on through-hole mini-boards - just add your own jumpers!

For this first entry in the series, I'm going through my build of the Emerald - a clone of the Boss PH-1r Phaser pedal originally released in 1980. These pedals are not exactly rare or incredibly expensive - good examples run around $200 on Reverb, with mint examples still falling below the $400 mark - but they have been hard to clone because they require four matched JFETs to function properly (and matching through hole JFETs is hard enough, I can only imagine what a pain in the aaa... butt... matching SMDs would be). Fortunately, AionFX offers matched sets of JFETs for only $8 - which is totally worth it from where I sit!

Prior to this build, I'd only built one (edit - on further review I've actually built two, but I haven't yet blogged one of them - I should get on that!) Boss pedal clone before - the insanely complex Dimension C chorus pedal (which quite frankly lives on my pedal board at this point). Given that experience, I figured other boss pedals would be similarly "dense" in terms of number of components and complexity of build, and I was right. AionFX officially lists this as an "intermediate" build, and honestly I'd tend to agree with that. I don't think it quite makes it to the level of "advanced", but it is on the high end of intermediate.

As you can see from the PCB above, this board is pretty much the diametric opposite of the Yacana  (Way Huge Red Llama) build I posted earlier in the week. Whereas that build had a smattering of components and a sea of blank red PCB, on this build you can barely see the green of the PCB peeking through, and much of that is because I'm still burning down my stock of angled 10K ohm resistors I picked up during the component shortage. In the middle of the board, you can see the matched set of four JFETs on the through hole mini-boards. 

AionFX did a great job designing the mini board and four JFET set to interface easily with the PCB. The  JFET set comes as a unit with the perforated portions of the board still intact. The model of the SMD is included to ensure you're grabbing the correct JEFT for the job!

The SMD itself is on the other side, with drain, source, and gate all labeled on both the through hole board and on the Emerald PCB itself. The orientation of source, drain, and gate are the same on the small boards as they are on the PCB itself. Furthermore the spacing between the JFET locations is such that you don't even have to separate the four through hole boards to solder them to the PCB - so I didn't! It made keeping everything aligned much easier and neater.

Setting the bias for the pedal is easy enough to do by ear. I've got mine dialed in pretty well at this point, but I may tweak it further (phasers and flangers almost always seem to need that final adjustment!). Honestly the pedal sounds great! For the enclosure for this project, I decided to go with a straight homage to the original much like the Dimension Chorus pedal. In fact, get used to this as I'm going that route for all of my Boss clones. I still need to get the Steggo placard on the front of the pedal, but I tend do those in groups (and I'm very much in the middle of a group of builds at this point!).