And Now for Something Completely Different! Friedman BE OD Deluxe Clone

So this build (well, it was actually a double-build) represents a couple of firsts for me. First and foremost, this is the first pedal commission build I've done. A friend approached me and asked if I'd do a pedal for their brother for his birthday. We settled on an "IOU" where he got to pick the pedal and I'd get it together for him. I've built a lot of different pedals, but leaving a request open ended like that always leaves you open to surprises. At the same time, guitar tone and pedalboards are fairly personal, so people tend to like to pick their own. He ended up choosing the Friedman BE OD Deluxe as the pedal he wanted. "Great," I thought... "What's that???" I thought next. After a bit of research I found the information on it. The pedal emulates the Friedman BE-100 amplifier with a high-gain and lower-gain channel, and it's not particularly cheap retailing for around $270. So I set about to find a clone of this beast and get cracking.

Which brings me to the second "first" in this particular project, my PCB source. AionFX offers the BE-OD (single channel) pedal as the Tempest, but I really didn't relish the idea of trying to fuse two of those together to create the 2-channel deluxe version of the pedal. Therefore, I had to keep hunting. Fortunately I did eventually find another source with a great reputation, it was just one I hadn't used before. PedalPCB has a really wide selection of boards, and I'd already picked-up a couple for other projects but hadn't gotten around to building them. As it turns out, they offered not only the single channel version as the Thermionic Distortion, but the dual-channel version as the Thermionic Deluxe. So I grabbed a couple of the PCBs and set to work.

PedalPCB does things a bit differently than many of the other PCB manufacturers I've used in the past. The actual values for the resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc. are all silkscreened directly onto the PCB rather than listing them as R1, R2, C1, C2, etc. For "single version" PCBs this makes a lot of sense and makes it harder to screw up the build process. Their LED markings are also a bit different than what I'm used to, but they include a convenient guide on their page to translate. That was important for this build because of what I presume are clipping diodes in the tone path (they sure glow when I play!). 

Because this is a dual pedal with a full bass / mid / treble equalizer there are tons of potentiometers to deal with (as you can see in the photo above). Unlike the original pedal, which uses a toggle switch for the "Tight" control, the Thermionic Deluxe uses a potentiometer (AionFX's Tempest goes this route as well). I only have a couple of criticisms of the PedalPCB board, but one of them is the spacing. As you can see from the enclosures above, the two rows of potentiometers literally run into each other if you have the dust covers on. There is plenty of room in the enclosure to spread out the two channels and provide just a little more space. Alternately, the bottom row of potentiometers could be reversed which would solve the issue as well.

In the photo above you can see another issue with the very tight PCB - the Volume B control lies between three electrolytic capacitors. This makes soldering that pot to the board a bit challenging as well. I did make one modification my builds, however. As designed the channel LED is a standard LED. This means the LED is only illuminated for one of the two channels. Looking at how the hand wired channel stomp switch was set up, there was a lug not being used, so I figured one could use a bi-color LED with a little off board wiring giving you one color for Channel A and a second color for Channel B. A quick read through the PedalPCB forum confirmed that many others have gone this route, so I went with a red/blue for the channel LED (special thanks to Rexie above for holding / modeling the bi-color LED). Of course, in this version the "blue" channel is reversed from the original, but it is what it is. As a final aside, eagle eyed readers will catch a goof in the PCB above that was caught before power-on...

The only major difference between serial number 1 and 2 is my choice of 3mm LEDs (of which there are four per channel). Serial Number 2 is the commission build, so I used the nicer diffused LEDs from Mouser for that build. I had some other diffused LEDs I used on my build, and I can tell a slight difference in sound, but nothing major. Both channels have their own trimmer resistor that allows you to dial in the tone of each channel to suit the player's needs. I ended up shortening some of the wires on the hand-wired stomp switch on Serial Number #2 to make soldering it up to the board a bit neater, and as you can see all of the jack connections are shrink wrapped (I'm doing that on all of my pedals now). Given the amount of empty space in the as-completed case, it's clear that there is plenty of room to make the PCB slightly larger to relieve the potentiometer traffic jam.

For the enclosure, I took inspiration from the original and sort of ran with it. It is obviously a Friedman clone, but it uses open-source or my own licensed fonts and the PedalPCB name rather than just the original. Adding all of the knobs took a while, and actually dialing in the tone to where I was happy with it took a little bit of time as well. However, I'm honestly quite happy with the end result. These are challenging builds on many levels. The parts count is high (almost 60 resistors, over 40 capacitors, 7 ICs, 9 diodes, and 10 LEDs), there are 14 potentiometers (and two on board LEDs) that you need to align to fit the PCB over, and you have to hand wire one of the 3PDT stomp switches. The finished pedal will be hitting the mail this week, so hopefully the recipient will be equally happy with it! I'm keeping my fingers crossed!