Mystery Meat - Cloning the New PRS Horsemeat

At the end of September, PRS announced their first three guitar effects pedals: a dual analog flanger called Wind Through the Trees, an optical compressor called Mary Cries, and a transparent overdrive called, of all things, Horsemeat. I'm forced to add yet another pedal to my list of awesome pedals with terrible names. That being said, in what has to be one of the shortest intervals between when a pedal is released and when it was first cloned, PedalPCB recently released the "Mystery Meat" - a clone of the Horsemeat overdrive pedal. With new pedals running just short of $250, and the few used ones out there starting at about $190, this is a great cloning candidate, so I decided to get cooking!

The layout of the board itself isn't terribly complex. It is a little unusual in that it uses four single op-amps (as opposed to a couple of dual op amps), but it appears to be using germanium clipping diodes which isn't anything out of the ordinary. For the build, I used all Yageo 1% 1/4 watt resistors. Most of the film capacitors (including the big honkin' 4.7uF film capacitor) are WIMA, but there are a couple of KEMET ones thrown in for some of the odd values where Mouser was out of stock of the WIMA versions. Tolerance on all of the film capacitors is 5%. The electrolytic capacitors are all Nichicon. There are two 1N34A diodes which I'd picked up a while back from Pedalhacker, as well as one 1N270 and one 1N4148. The full building documentation and schematic aren't available yet, and I haven't sat down to try and trace how the diode clipping is working at this point. The op amps are all new TL072IP from Mouser with sockets.

For the offboard wiring, I decided to go the same route as I'd gone with my Kliche mini build, and just use the extra ground connections from the board rather than using the AionFX standard star ground to the input jack. It does make wiring up the pedal more straightforward and looks a bit neater in the enclosure as well. I'm using a 24 gauge ribbon cable to connect the 3PDT daughter board to the main PCB. I had just enough room to run the board connection underneath - emphasis on "just enough."

I'd teased the "in progress" enclosure art for this built previously, but nothing quite compares to having the final product in your hands. Steggo Studios unofficial tagline is "Because who doesn't like dinosaurs," and I decided to change that ever so slightly for this particular enclosure. I think I like the yellow knobs on this, but I'm still a little undecided.

I need to get a sound demo going for this one, but as far as I can tell so far, it's behaving like the ones on the various Youtube demos out there. I'd hoped to compare it to "the real thing" at my favorite local guitar store, but they'd just sold out of the Horsemeat pedal, so now I have to wait for another one to come in to do the paired test.