Custom Built Brutalist Jr. - With Steggo!

Kurt Ballou at God City instruments had the brilliant idea to create a distortion pedal, the Brutalist Jr.,  and use the PCB as a business card. I'm not sure whether or not he still gives these out as business cards, but the PCB is still available on his DIY PCB website. I'd previously built clones of the Brutalist Jr. using both hand-etched and commercially produced PCBs which would fit in a 125B enclosure, as the original business card version requires a slightly larger enclosure. However, a local friend had one of the original PCBs lying around and asked if I would build it up. Since I'd never built one of the "real things" - I jumped at the chance!

Updated International Style!

About a year ago I'd built a couple pedals based on the Godcity Brutalist Jr. - a really neat, fairly mod-able, distortion pedal using a hand-etched board based on the template from Effects Layouts. It's an awesome pedal, but as I have been having some issues with my lithography lately - I hadn't made any more because I haven't been able to hand etch boards recently. Fortunately, my friend at South Obolon FX was able to lay out a board for me, so now I have some printed circuit boards - that fit neatly into my preferred 125B enclosure size that I can use going forward!

Distortion Pedal Meets Business Card?????

In the world of guitar effects pedals, there are a lot of cool ideas and amazing variations on the theme. Some builders go the high tech route with programmable logic chips. At the other end of the spectrum you have builders still using perf board or direct connections (and their soldering is elevated to the level of art in many cases). One of the most interesting ideas I'd seen for a DIY pedal is the Godcity Instruments Brutalist Jr. distortion pedal. Kurt Ballou literally had his business card made up as a PCB that you could populate on your own. He provided a set of instructions and modifications on his website (which are still there). Sadly, the business card DIY version itself is sold out at the moment, but Effects Layouts has a trace and etching pattern - so I took the plunge!