Cloning the Limited Edition Way Huge Geisha Drive

One of the greatest things about DIY guitar pedals is that you're often free to recreate limited edition, rare, or out of production pedals that would be hard or impossible to get ahold of otherwise. The Way Huge Geisha Drive was a fairly niche overdrive / distortion pedal originally released back in around 2017. As far as I can tell, it looks like there were three enclosure variants produced - a red, a blue, and a special handwired edition limited to 40 units. Normal red / blue versions seem to be hovering around the $300 range, while the handwired versions go for over $1000. I'd etched myself a couple of boards using the Effects Layout tracing, and I've got both boards populated (though only one boxed). Of course, no sooner do I etch up my own boards, but I find that PedalPCB appears to have one as the Samurai project. I've ordered one of their boards for comparison, and I might go that route for future builds if I can make it work in my enclosure design without too many modifications. 

As you can see from the board above, this is sort of an "intermediate" level build - well, at least in the world of do it yourself etched PCBs. Compared to a conventional manufactured board, these are always more challenging. The grounding on the effects layout board is excellent, though with several locations available to attach in a ground.

With one very notable exception, there's nothing especially exotic about the parts used to build the Geisha Drive. A couple of the values of capacitors are a little odd (I'm staring at you 270n film capacitor), but the rest are fairly conventional. For my first board, I used mostly Wima capacitors, but for the second board I substituted in a few Panasonic film capacitors. The diodes are just standard 1N4148s which I've been buying in bulk these days!

The one exotic component in the whole build is the JRC4741D (also known as the NJM4741D). It's a quad high-gain op amp which is sadly now out of production. I've tracked down some "alleged" NJM4741Ds from a source in China (I know, "Danger Will Robinson, Danger!"), we'll see how they work. That being said, I've seen the LM348 flogged as a 741 replacement, so that's what I'm currently running in the pedals, and so far they sound pretty much like the original. I need to do some more tone testing, though!

For the enclosure, I wanted to do something fun and unique. So instead of the Geisha Drive, we now have the Steggo-san Overdrive pedal (with Steggo enjoying his walk through the forest bottom right). At this point I'm using some modified Adobe clip art for a lot of the background, but if I decide to make these in quantity, I may replace the art with an original piece. The Kanji is supposed to be "dinosaur," but given I speak little Japanese and read no Kanji, it could be "stinky cabbage" for all I know (Google seemed to indicate it was Dinosaur, though). This is certainly one of the best looking pedals I've put together - hopefully it will work well enough to find a semi-permanent place on the board!