Kurt Ballou at God City instruments had the brilliant idea to create a distortion pedal, the Brutalist Jr., and use the PCB as a business card. I'm not sure whether or not he still gives these out as business cards, but the PCB is still available on his DIY PCB website. I'd previously built clones of the Brutalist Jr. using both hand-etched and commercially produced PCBs which would fit in a 125B enclosure, as the original business card version requires a slightly larger enclosure. However, a local friend had one of the original PCBs lying around and asked if I would build it up. Since I'd never built one of the "real things" - I jumped at the chance!
Since I was building up one of the actual Brutalist Jr. PCBs, I needed to come up with an awesome enclosure to go with it. Once I came up with the enclosure, I realized I would really love to build one for myself using the same enclosure. Fortunately the Brutalist Jr. PCB is back in stock at the God City Instruments store, so I snagged one for myself as well!
As this pedal was designed for just about anyone to build, the layout is very clean and straightforward - and none of the components are particularly exotic. I used my normal mix of 1% metal film resistors, 5% metal film capacitors, MLCCs and Nichicon electrolytic capacitors. For my friend's pedal, I'm using the TL082 op amps like I use in my "International Style" builds (top in the photo above). For my pedal, I'm starting with the TL072 - but I plan on experimenting a little since I already have my own "International Style" build with TL082 op amps.
For the enclosure, the Brutalist Jr. uses a 1590BB sized enclosure - I went with a 1590BB2 because it provides extra depth and makes fitting the jacks and pots easier. I also modified the stomp switch wiring a little from the recommendation in the Brutalist Jr. instructions so I could just use my Steggo 3PDT daughter board. Most of the signal wires, and the wires for the LED are connected to the bottom of the PCB. The only wires I ended up running out of the top of the board was the +9V and the ground connections for the power jack and audio jacks.
For the enclosure, I decided to once again play on the "Brutalist" theme of the pedal and use Brutalist architecture as the basis of the art. I took a Brutalist building and heavily modified it in photoshop before bringing it over to illustrator. I then found a great stegosaurus sketch I was able to digitize and put in green over the sepia of the building. I think it came out looking pretty cool - so cool that (as I mentioned) I had to make one for myself too!
In terms of the sound - it's a Brutalist Jr. It's a no holds barred, melt your face, amazingly high gain distortion pedal. If you dial it way back you can do some more subtle stuff with it as well, though.
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