Aion Convex - Dinosaural OTC-201 Major Steggo Update!

Almost exactly a year ago I posted my first Dinosaural OTC-201 build. Since that time, the pedal has literally lived on my board. It is one of my most used and useful pedals, and has in the intervening months completely taken over compressor duties on my board (in fact, I recently sold my MXR Script Dyna Comp as I simply wasn't using it). If you can find one of these beauties, they still run in the $300-$400 range, but a quick check revealed none for sale. So, I decided it was high time I moved on from the borrowed graphics of the first version, and create a truly Steggo version of the pedal!

Dinosaural Compressor OTC-201 Clone - With a Real Dino!

So this was another really fun build that may now be usurping some of my other compressor pedals as my favorite - at least for my single-coil guitars. That being said, my stock MXR Dyna Comp is still fairly amazing when I pull out my Les Paul. This build recreates a rare, though not ridiculously expensive ($300-$400-ish), compressor pedal - the Dinosaural OTC-201. Aion FX sells this as the Convex in both PCB and kit forms. I went ahead and picked mine up as a PCB as I wanted to hand pick some of the components and get as close to the original as possible.

Fresh Compressed Orange Juice?

This build is a clone of the Orange Squeezer compression circuit by Guitar PCB called the "Julius". I picked up the PCB for this project because it's pretty much the sound Mark Knopfler uses on "Sultans of Swing" - which I need a lot more practice before I'm competent at! This build itself is pretty straightforward with very few parts. Guitar PCB is a smaller outfit, so you get a parts list and some decent instructions, but unlike Aion FX there isn't a pre-populated shopping list with part numbers for Mouser or Tayda. I just added additional parts to an order I was making to cover the components needed for this build.

Aion Oceanid - Cornish OC-1 Optical Compressor Adaptation

Here's a project I literally finished up last night. Granted, the PCB had been populated a couple of weeks ago, but it took me a while to get the enclosure to a point where I was happy with it. The Aion Oceanid is quite a bit more complex than Acapulco I detailed in my previous blog entry, and is an adaptation of the Cornish OC-1. This brings me to one of the major benefits of building your own guitar effects pedals. The cheapest I've seen a Cornish OC-1 for sale is about $750. Some Cornish pedals blast through the $1000 mark. The Aion PCB will cost you $12, and the rest of the components (assuming you get good quality ones) should run you $50-$60, meaning you get a boutique pedal for an order of magnitude less cost - assuming you're willing to put the time in to build it.