Abra Kadabra! It's a Sabbra Cadabra Clone!

I'd originally intended to post another Boss project today, but I've had a very uncharacteristic failure to function issue with a Boss / AionFX build. I'm still working on that debug off and on, but in the meantime here's another pedal that I recently finished up. I'm hoping to get back to the Boss builds later in the week and get the dead one debugged.

Distortion pedals are a staple of rock pedal boards everywhere, and there are tons of options both vintage and modern to help the player get whatever particular sound they're looking for. This particular project is a clone of the Catalinbread Sabbra Cadabra, which helps the player capture Tony Iommi's tone in a convenient 125B-sized box. Originally released in 2014, the pedal is still in production and isn't terribly expensive. However, you can file this one in the "it's cheaper to build" - at least a bit - category. For this build I used the AionFX Ceres project board and original MPF4393 transistors purchased directly from AionFX. 

A Pair of Wooly Fuzz Pedals

Fuzz pedals are one of the more popular builds in the DIY community because of the variety of options, both vintage and modern, out there. Fuzz and Distortion sounds formed the foundation of rock and blues music in the 50s, 60s, and 70s with the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone commonly thought to be the first available effects pedal being released in 1962. For these two builds, I used the Aion FX Calliope board which replicates the Catalinbread Karma Suture - which in of itself is an adaptation of the earlier Interfax Harmonic Percolator. The Karma Suture is a fairly modern pedal first released as a germanium transistor based version in 2014. A silicon version followed in 2016. They're not terribly expensive or rare, but they are a great simple build which will let you get a pedal for a fraction of the cost of an original.