A New Dimetrodon Distortion Variant in an Amazing Enclosure!

The Dimetrodon Distortion was Steggo Studios first original pedal design. Like most analog guitar pedals these days, it has DNA that can be traced back to earlier designs, but it fills a niche that none of the designs it is based on don't - at least for the tones I've been after. Last year I'd given away a prototype version of the pedal when my Instagram channel hit 1000 followers. It is getting close to 1500 now, so I decided it was time for another giveaway, but this time with a few twists!

This time out the pedal uses the production version of the PCB laid out by my good friend at South Obolon FX. This has been a really solid little board, and I've nearly gone through my whole first order of 25 of them (and as a matter of fact I just ordered some more!). I wanted to do something fun and a little different for this pedal, so I decided to go with  carbon film resistors and the red epoxy film capacitors to give it a bit of an "old school" look inside. I also went with the Triangle BMP tone stack - which I haven't tried before, but should be very close to the Sovtek stack based on the tone stack calculations I've done previously. The rest of the parts are my normal load out of diodes as well as tantalum and electrolytic capacitors. The IC (not yet installed above) and transistor are all new production.

Since this is a special pedal, and it has a battery (which means the back may actually occasionally get opened), I went ahead and added the trimmer to adjust the LED brightness on the 3PDT daughter board. If I can get enough of the trimmers in bulk, I may start doing this on more of my pedals as it is a kind of nice option for people who play both indoors and outdoors. I'm using ribbon cable to connect the main PCB to the daughter board - although because of how the PCB is set up I do have to do some surgery on it. It's still quicker and easier than cutting and stripping individual lengths of wire! The jacks are all connected with aviation grade wire from Tube Depot and insulated with heat shrink tubing.

Because this is a contest pedal, the back is engraved with a unique name and the signatures of all of the major staff dinosaurs here at the Studio! For the contest theme, I decided to go with "Reunite Pangea" - which was a supercontinent in the Permian geologic period - when the Dimetrodon actually was walking about! The enclosure itself was powder coated by Chicken Wing Audio - and the color is just amazing!

Chicken Wing Audio also did the silk screening on the front of the pedal as well, and I'm really happy with how it came out. The dimetrodon is part of a larger block print by linocut artist Brian Reedy who kindly allowed the studio to license his work. I added the rest of the graphics and included Brian's logo as well. The simple black with the copper colored enclosure really seems to pop.