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... okay, now that everyone's back. The Woman Tone pedal captures Eric Clapton's tone from his days in Cream using his custom Gibson SG and Marshall 100W amp (note to self, I still need to get a Gibson SG...). It's a neat, if somewhat niche, pedal that typically runs over $350. Given the fairly steep cost of entry, I knew I could do a lot better! I started with the new PedalPCB Whipped Cream board, which accurately recreates the Aclam pedal, but does so in a compact 125B form factor!
From the photo above you can see that I've gone ahead and worked up three PCBs. While the boards are dense, they're very well laid out with the resistors in neat row, making soldering them straightforward. I typically use Yageo MFR series 1/4W metal film resistors with 1% tolerance. Unfortunately there are a couple of oddball values that aren't available in the MFR series anymore. The build uses one 5.1MΩ resistor which is no longer available in the MFR series. It is available in the MFR_S series, which is roughly half the size of the normal resistors (it's about the same size as a standard 1/8W resistor). It also uses a couple of 10MΩ resistors which Yageo only has available in a completely different series. So those of you with OCD will probably have some slight objections to my resistor loadout. There are surprisingly few capacitors, and I'm using the normal mix of WIMA and KEMET metal film caps and Nichicon electrolytic caps. The build also uses one 1N7000 and four J201 transistors. The build also requires a TY-141P Audio Transformer, which I picked up from PedalPCB along with the boards.
While populating the circuit board was fairly straightforward, getting everything into the enclosure was slightly less so. The layout on the PCB is excellent if you follow the normal drill pattern, but I made the executive decision to go in a slightly modified direction with the enclosure because I wanted room for more art on the pedal itself. In other words, when faced with choice between practicality and esthetics, you know which one won that! I therefore adjusted the placement of the dual stomp switches and, more significantly as it turned out, the LEDs to roughly match the AionFX pattern as used on their Roland Bee-Baa clone I'd built previously. This means I had to run the leads for the LEDs about a centimeter toward the middle of the enclosure. I ended up adding heat shrink to the leads (so they wouldn't short each other out) rather than replacing them with wire because the fit was fairly tight. Moving the stomp switches toward the corners also meant I couldn't simply use pin headers to connect the two footswitch daughter boards to the main PCB, but ribbon cable did the job nicely.
I'll be honest, coming up with a suitably unique dinosaur-themed name and enclosure for this pedal took a little while, but once inspiration hit, I took the idea and ran with it. There wasn't much dinosaur related I could do with "The Woman Tone," and this is a very different overdrive than the "Steggo-San" or "Zen Steggo" pedals, so just calling it the (insert dino reference here) Overdrive just wasn't going to cut it. Thinking back, the album where Eric Clapton really used the tone the most was Disraeli Gears. Once I had that reference in my head, throw in a steampunk diplodocus and some of the craziest Adobe Illustrator work I've ever done, and voilà instant awesome enclosure... well, I think so anyway.
As to the sound of the pedal, it absolutely nails it. I'm still experimenting with the "color" control on the Whipped Cream, but I really like the fact that what is an internal switch on the original is an external switch on the PedalPCB version. Granted, I've only tested it with one of my Epiphone Les Pauls at this point; I really need to get the Gibson out and really put it through its paces. Sadly I don't have an SG to get 100% authentic (yet), but when that happy day arrives, I know what pedal I'm running it through first!
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