A Custom Triangle Big Mutt Phi!

The Triangle version of the Big Muff Pi is one of the more popular versions of the venerable circuit. I've built one in the past using a Tayda board, and it came out really pretty well. A friend was in the market for a Big Muff clone, and so I brought in pretty much my complete stable of variants to my favorite local guitar store (Five Star Guitars) so he could try them all on relevant amplifiers. In the end, he decided he wanted a triangle variant. He also wanted something in a form factor slightly larger than my standard 125B Big Mutt Phi build, so I decided to just go back to the Tayda board and come up with a suitably cool 1590BB2 enclosure for it!

Even though this is a very vintage style build, I tried to follow my recipe from the previous Triangle I'd built as closely as possible. That means I ended up using all modern 1% metal film resistors rather than carbon film or carbon composition resistors. They're all either Yageo or KOA Speer. The film and ceramic capacitors are pretty much all new production KEMET and Topmay, but I did splurge and drop in a few of my remaining 100nF Panasonic film capacitors, as that's what I'd used on the previous build. There's only one electrolytic capacitor, and it's a Nichicon. The diodes are all new production as I was out of vintage ones. However based on my research they roughly match the voltage drop of the diodes in vintage units. The transistors are the last of my vintage PN5133s from Pedalhacker. These all tested out with fairly low gain in the high 90s and low 100s, which I'm guessing gives this particular build part of its unique sound (as I'd used transistors from the same source last time, but didn't measure the gain).  

The Tayda Big Muff board itself is a little unusual in that it sits vertically in the enclosure rather than horizontally. It's also fairly small, so the inside of the enclosure is very roomy. The wiring is also a bit different from either AionFX or PedalPCB as well. As I didn't have any Tayda 3PDT stomp switch daughter boards handy, I went with one from Frog Pedals that easily allows connection of 9V power and the switch to the main effect PCB itself. 

My friend also wanted the battery to be enabled on this build, so I went ahead and added the battery clip. That meant using one stereo and one mono jack. I decided to go for an old school look on the jacks as well and used open frame jacks. As per my normal practice, all of the jack connections are insulated with heat shrink tubing.

For the enclosure, I decided to give something different a try. Tayda has just released a "clear matte" finish for their enclosures. This is basically taking the bare metal and giving it a dull coat. I figured it would make an excellent foundation for the art, which is very obviously based on the vintage Big Muff Pi enclosure. However, I did add the muttaburrasaurus to the enclosure, and as there's a Greek letter in the name of the pedal, I carried through the Greek temple style from the 125B enclosure - this time Mutt's in front of the Parthenon! The knobs are even Electro-Harmonix knobs, though this one sports an extremely cool purple LED.

In terms of sound, it is extremely close to my previous build. Honestly the only real differences I'm finding is the volume comes on slightly later in the knob turn on the new pedal than on the original build, but seems to max out at the same level. I'm going to attribute this to variation in the potentiometers. Hopefully my friend likes it because I love the way it came out. I may even go so far as re-housing my existing triangle BMP in an enclosure just like this.