A New Electric Mistress Clone - With a Dinosaur Theme!

The Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress is one of the foundation modulation effects pedals released in the 1970's. It has been used by many guitar luminaries over the years, and is a really amazing flanger / chorus pedal. I'd previously built the PCB Guitar Mania version of the board - though it appears that this was a copy of the Madbean Current Lover board as it had many of the same quirks. Madbean has recently released a 2023 revision of the board that adds a volume knob, support for multiple BBD chips, and multi-voltage support (up to 18V). While my previous build was a great pedal, I really wanted to do a fun dinosaur version to add to my Steggo line-up. I'd also gotten requests for an Electric Mistress clone from some friends, and I really wanted to go with a better base PCB than on my original build, so I grabbed a few of the new Madbean boards and got to work!

Updating the Electric Mistress - No Send / Receive Loop Mod

Last week I posted an entry detailing my EHX Electric Mistress build based on the PCB Guitar Mania Electric Lover PCB. Overall I was pretty happy with the build, but I had noticed something a little unusual when I began the calibration process. In my first entry I mentioned having to crank the bias trimmer quite a bit to get a good tone (or any tone at all for that matter). On the PCB Guitar Mania Facebook group, another user posted that he was having a similar issue with his build, although his was apparently bad enough to where he couldn't get a reasonable calibration. Fortunately the long-time board users had a fix for him, and since I'd had a similar issue in my base-build, I decided to take a deep breath, pull the PCB out of the enclosure and try the fix on mine as well. 

The Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress Flanger / Chorus

I'll be completely honest, I'm not a great guitar player at this point. I'm somewhere in the "intermediate" range, but I'm having a huge amount of fun learning not only guitar technique but chasing great sounds. One of the songs I've always loved is Rush's "Natural Science," and the flange effects at the beginning of it really do a lot to set the tone and mood of the piece. While no one seems to have a definitive answer (apart from Alex Lifeson, who apparently hasn't discussed / disclosed what hardware was used), the consensus is that he used an EHX Electric Mistress on the album Permanent Waves - especially on "The Spirit of Radio" (another song I need to learn...). As I'm on a massive pedal-building kick, and given one of my other guitar heroes David Gilmour also used one, I decided to build my own EHX Electric Mistress using PCB Guitar Mania's Electric Lover Flanger PCB.