Capturing a Legend's Sound - Cloning the Cornerstone Gladio SC

Stevie Ray Vaughan was one of the greatest rock / blues guitarists of all time. Many people have attempted to capture his distinctive tone, and many pedals have tried to capture that tone as well. The Cornerstone Gladio SC standalone preamp takes a somewhat unique approach by allowing a blend of the clean and driven signals - along with volume and tone control. There is even a toggle that allows for compression to be added to a signal. The end effect is you can essentially get a tone which sounds like it is running through a dual amplifier set up with one clean amp and one overdriven amp. I had a request to build one, so I went in search of a PCB and got to it!

PedalPCB has a clone of the Gladio SC released as the Scenario Preamp. As with all PedalPCB boards, it is well laid out and all of the components are easy to identify and place. I'm using all modern bits for this build - 1% tolerance metal film resistors from Yageo, 5% tolerance metal film capacitors from WIMA and KEMET, and 20% tolerance electrolytic capacitors from Nichicon. For the pF range capacitors I did go ahead and splurge and use silver mica caps. The ICs are all socketed, and six 1N4148 diodes round out the components. Absolutely nothing that is hard to find in the mix.

The rest of the build was straightforward as well. I decided to relocate the LED from the main board to my 3PDT daughter board - largely for artwork considerations! The main board is connected to the daughter board with ribbon cable, while all of the the other connections are made with aviation grade hook-up wire. Per my normal practice, all of the connections to the audio and power jacks are insulated with heat shrink tubing. 

As this was a custom job, I worked with the recipient to come up with a design he wanted. He'd previously seen my Steggo-san and Zen Steggo designs, and wanted something along the same lines. I decided on a Theropod as the dinosaur mascot and then created one with text for myself - and one without for the requestor! According to Wikipedia: 

“Theropoda from Ancient Greek θηρίον (thēríon) 'wild beast', and πούς, ποδός (poús, podós) 'foot'), whose members are known as theropods, is a dinosaur clade that is characterized by hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb. Theropods are generally classed as a group of saurischian dinosaurs. They were ancestrally carnivorous, although a number of theropod groups evolved to become herbivores and omnivores. Theropods first appeared during the Carnian age of the late Triassic period 231.4 million years ago (Ma) and included the majority of large terrestrial carnivores from the Early Jurassic until at least the close of the Cretaceous, about 66 Ma. In the Jurassic, birds evolved from small specialized coelurosaurian theropods, and are today represented by about 10,500 living species.”

As to the pedal itself, I'm sad to report that I don't sound like SRV... Oh, it captures the tone just fine, but I'm just not that level of a player! Guess I need to spend more time practicing... though I have a song in a very different genre I'm currently focused on...