The Astrodon Physicist - A Brian May Treble Boost Clone

Many guitarists have a very unique and distinct sound which has been honed over the years. While a great deal of tone comes from playing technique, contributions from pickups, pedals, amplifiers, tone wood, etc. are often critical elements of the overall sound. Brian May is well-known for having a very bright sound, much of which came from the use of treble boosters in his amplifier or effects loop. This first pedal in the "One Knob Collection" replicates that treble boost circuit in an easy to use pedal.

The board itself was laid out by South Obolon FX (Slava Ukraini!). As one would expect, this is not a terribly complex build. There are a few resistors, five capacitors, a circuit protection diode, and one transistor. For these initial builds, I'm using 1N5088 transistors, but it is likely the BC182L is the actual transistor used. I've built a socketed version of this board which I'm going to use to test various transistors to see what (if any) difference they make. I'll report any results in a future blog entry. All of the components are brand new sourced from Mouser - Yageo and KAO Speer resistors, WIMA and KEMET film capacitors, and Nichicon electrolytic capacitors. To make wiring the stomp switch easier - I'm using a PedalPCB 3PDT breakout board.

These "one knob" pedals are the first I'm building in a 1590B enclosure. These are smaller in all three directions from the 125B enclosures I'm used to. As such, I adjusted the locations of the jacks - and used lower profile 1/4" input and output jacks. I'd thought about adding battery functionality, but most people seem to simply use AC adaptors are large power supplies at this point, so I used the extra space for enclosure art instead!

I had a lot of fun coming up with a good name and enclosure for this pedal. For those who don't know, in addition to being a virtuoso guitarist Sir Brian May, CBE holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College London. The Astrodon was a large sauropod dinosaur, so I decided calling the Brian May treble boost "The Astrodon Physicist" with a night sky background would strike the right tone (pun intended). For being such a simple circuit, this is a really nice boost pedal. I don't know if it is something that is going to be a permanent fixture on the pedal board, but it will certainly be in "heavy rotation."