A New Steggo Pedal - The Pterodactyl Phaser!!!

Back in February, I finished my first build of the AionFX Emerald - a clone of the Boss PH-1R phaser. It was a really nice pedal, in fact it is finding a semi-permanent home on my pedal board. It wasn't an easy build, as there are a lot of components and the pedal has to be properly biased once assembled. Now that I'm assembling a whole range of dinosaur-themed pedals, I wanted to include a phaser, and I had a great idea for the enclosure (more on that in a bit). It was really just a question of which phaser to choose. Most of the fun of DIY is building something that is hard to come by because of cost, rarity, the fact that it is out of production, or a combination of all of those. Since the Boss pedal is long out of production, and retail it generally costs $200-$300 US, I figured it fit the bill.

Set Phasers to Stun! The Boss PH-1r

In November of last year, AionFX announced six new boards based on classic Boss pedals - with four of the six never having appeared as a DIY PCB before. Needless to say I picked up the whole set. In addition to the new PCBs, AionFX also offered special JFET sets which would facilitate building these pedals, as in many cases the circuits required JFETs no longer available in anything but SMD form. The PCB boards themselves support adding an SMD if you're up to it, or you can buy pre-soldered SMDs from AionFX on through-hole mini-boards - just add your own jumpers!

For this first entry in the series, I'm going through my build of the Emerald - a clone of the Boss PH-1r Phaser pedal originally released in 1980. These pedals are not exactly rare or incredibly expensive - good examples run around $200 on Reverb, with mint examples still falling below the $400 mark - but they have been hard to clone because they require four matched JFETs to function properly (and matching through hole JFETs is hard enough, I can only imagine what a pain in the aaa... butt... matching SMDs would be). Fortunately, AionFX offers matched sets of JFETs for only $8 - which is totally worth it from where I sit!