Updated International Style!

About a year ago I'd built a couple pedals based on the Godcity Brutalist Jr. - a really neat, fairly mod-able, distortion pedal using a hand-etched board based on the template from Effects Layouts. It's an awesome pedal, but as I have been having some issues with my lithography lately - I hadn't made any more because I haven't been able to hand etch boards recently. Fortunately, my friend at South Obolon FX was able to lay out a board for me, so now I have some printed circuit boards - that fit neatly into my preferred 125B enclosure size that I can use going forward!

As you can see from the photo above, the new PCB fits neatly into the enclosure and it even has the same knob layout as my original boards as well. As before, I'm using mostly new components for the build. Metal film resistors from Yageo and KOA Speer. The film capacitors are generally 5% tolerance WIMA and KEMET (though the larger values are 10% tolerance). The electrolytic capacitors are all Nichicon. The one area where I've gone old school is I'm still using NOS op amps for the build. Honestly I don't think it makes a huge difference sound-wise as the new production ones should be electronically transparent, but since I have them I figured I'd use them.

The rest of the wiring is pretty standard. I'm using my 3PDT daughter board with the LED on it originally laid out by Drunk Beaver. I'm not using a brightness control for this one, so it just has a fixed current limiting resistor for the LED. The ground connections all go to the main PCB rather than using a star ground on the input jack, because the PCB had the extra ground pads to support the connections. All of the jack connections are insulated with heat shrink tubing, and I even managed to sneak a battery snap into the enclosure!

The enclosure art is exactly the same as last time. In case you didn't hit the link above:

"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."

This updated version of the pedal sounds exactly like the hand-etched one (which is to say it can melt your face if you crank it!), so I'll be able to make a few of these for either the shop or friends as needed.