A Most Tranquil Pedal, With a Most Tranquil Steggo!

Dumble Amplifiers are some of the most revered and most expensive boutique amplifiers on the market, and many pedals have attempted to capture their unique sound over the years with varying degrees of success. The Hermida Zendrive, first released in 2004, was the first overdrive pedal to attempt to capture the legendary Dumble sound. In 2013 production of the pedal was taken over by Lovepedal, but it remains a fairly boutique pedal. Current production pedals using film capacitors and through hole components run $240 with used versions running anywhere from $200 to $700+ depending on whether they're an original Hermida or the more recent Lovepedal branded copies. I had a fun idea for an enclosure for this one, so I decided to pick a couple up and see how it came out.

For this project I started with the AionFX Azimuth board. As this is a fairly simple build, AionFX sells this as both a kit and a bare PCB. The overall component count is fairly low, but buying as a board allows me to hand pick the more important components like transistors and diodes. The instructions indicate that D3 can be either a BAT41 Schottkey or that "some versions" use a 1N34A Germanium diode. I decided to go with the Germanium diode, as I doubt the kit includes one. The transistors are 2N7000 MOSFETs and the op amp is an NE5532P. The rest of the components are standard Yageo and Speer 1% metal film resistors, WIMA and Kemet metal film capacitors, and Nichicon electrolytic capacitors.

The wiring for the Azimuth is fairly simple. You only need one 3 position ribbon cable as the second bank of three connections only has the PCB out active. I purchased a lot of eight strand ribbon cable which I can then separate with an exact knife for these projects. I went ahead and added the battery cable to these to provide the option of running it off of battery or 9V DC input.

For the enclosure, I decided to stick with the Asian theme of the original enclosure - in a very "Steggo" way, of course! The enclosure artwork is in many ways similar to my Geisha Drive clone, using modified, licensed Adobe Stock images. Both include a stegosaurus interacting with the environment toward the bottom of the pedal as well. As the Zendrive itself features a yin-yang, I decided to add a stegosaurus version as a callback to the original.

I decided to go with fairy small knobs as they don't cover up as much of the art, and the black and white works well with the rest of the enclosure. The pedal sound is amazing, though I still need to compare it to the real thing. My friends at Five Star seemed to enjoy it a lot, along with a few others I'd brought down for fun. I'm sure I'll find a place for this one in "heavy rotation" on my pedal board!