Distortion Pedal Meets Business Card?????

In the world of guitar effects pedals, there are a lot of cool ideas and amazing variations on the theme. Some builders go the high tech route with programmable logic chips. At the other end of the spectrum you have builders still using perf board or direct connections (and their soldering is elevated to the level of art in many cases). One of the most interesting ideas I'd seen for a DIY pedal is the Godcity Instruments Brutalist Jr. distortion pedal. Kurt Ballou literally had his business card made up as a PCB that you could populate on your own. He provided a set of instructions and modifications on his website (which are still there). Sadly, the business card DIY version itself is sold out at the moment, but Effects Layouts has a trace and etching pattern - so I took the plunge!

If you compare the effects layout board to the business card version, you'll notice a lot of differences in layout. The business card version doesn't easily fit in a 125B enclosure (there were kits from Smallbear in ages past that look like they included a 1590B). The Effects Layout board is however designed to fit nicely in a 125B. 

I etched a couple of boards initially, but I've only populated one at this point. I had a little bit of resist lift on one of the boards this time around (the board on the right). It ended up being completely benign though as I only ended up losing a little bit of ground and a very short connection between a capacitor and a potentiometer. I was able to just leave the lead on the capacitor and connect it directly to the pot. Otherwise, the construction is very much like most of my other projects. The resistors are all 1% metal film (Yageo or KOA Speer), the film capacitors are Panasonic and Wima, the electrolytic capacitors are Nichicon. One of the modifications suggested is replacing the TL072 op amps with TL082 op amps. I just happened to have found a few classic units at my local electronics heaven... errrrr... component store, so I went ahead and dropped them in.

As this was my prototype, I wanted to test a few construction techniques that would make any future builds easier. First off, I went ahead and used one of my standard AionFX drill templates (and an AionFX 3PDT / LED daughter board). This meant I could leave a couple of components off of the main PCB (the protection diode and LED pulldown resistor). This particular drill template leaves room for a battery, so I went ahead and included a battery snap (I actually ended using repurposed parts for the DC jack, input / output jacks, and battery snap because I had a few pedals I'd torn down for debug). I'm using my regular star ground on this build as well.

For the enclosure I wanted to do something unique, but I feel as if I need to give the enclosure a little context. My wife has a degree in architecture, and when I hear the word "Brutalist" - I immediately think of Brutalist architecture. I sort of like Brutalist architecture, personally. In fact, one of the more entertaining aspects of the video game Fallout 4 is you can build your own bases/settlements. One of the building templates in the game lends itself very strongly to building brutalist structures - so you can guess what I spent an inordinate amount of time doing in game. So, for this pedal, I decided to run with the architecture theme.

I didn't want to use the "Brutalist" term for my version of the pedal as that name was, well, taken. So I had to come up with something new. While Brutalist architecture was a minimalist offshoot of modernism (rising after the Second World War), International Style is technically an earlier modern architecture form - though one that has had more staying power... sadly. It rose to prominence in the 70s and is perhaps the ultimate architectural embodiment of form following function (in many cases very far behind function!). Unfortunately a lot of International Style architecture can be sort of bland, but I figured juxtaposing a more brutalist building with a distortion pedal called "The International Style" was enough of a subversion of expectation to pass muster. The building itself is a heavily photoshopped version of a real Brutalist building, and the Steggo is actually a photo of our plush Stegosaurus mascot - again, heavily Photoshopped. 

The pedal itself lives up to its original name. This is an absolutely hardcore, no holds barred, no apologies distortion pedal. If you want it loud and crunchy, this is the pedal for you. I've printed out the Godcity mod instructions, and I'm considering laying this thing out on the prototyping board and using working through some of the various mods to see if I find a version I like better than the base build.