A New Dimetrodon Distortion Variant in an Amazing Enclosure!

The Dimetrodon Distortion was Steggo Studios first original pedal design. Like most analog guitar pedals these days, it has DNA that can be traced back to earlier designs, but it fills a niche that none of the designs it is based on don't - at least for the tones I've been after. Last year I'd given away a prototype version of the pedal when my Instagram channel hit 1000 followers. It is getting close to 1500 now, so I decided it was time for another giveaway, but this time with a few twists!

A Vintage Style Dimetrodon!

The Steggo Dimetrodon Distortion is based on the vintage Distortion+ circuit, but up to this point I'd only used all modern components in my Dimetrodon builds. Given the original Distortion+ dates from the 70's I thought it would be fun to look for old gut shots of the pedal to see what sort of components were used on the early iterations of that pedal and test out the Dimetrodon with something similar. I had also recently built a couple of Dimetrodon Distortion pedals with the Sovtek tone stack, but I didn't have one for personal use, so this build let me sort of kill two birds with one stone!

Old School MXR Distortion + PCB - Image from Premier Guitar

Special Dinovember 2023 Edition Dimetrodon Distortion Build Report!

A while back I had a Dimetrodon Distortion enclosure that had a bit of a problem. It had gotten scratched up, although the UV printing on the face of the enclosure was just great. I'd had mixed results trying to paint enclosures in the past, but I found some powder coat spray paint (rather than having to go through the powder coating process) and I figured this would be a great opportunity to see if I could recover a damaged enclosure - and then I decided to take it a few steps further!

Updating the Dimetrodon Distortion - A New Deluxe Version!

Back in June Steggo released its first original pedal design, the Dimetrodon Distortion. I love it (obviously), and a lot of other people have picked one up and really seem to be enjoying them. The only limitation of the original design was the fact that you had to pick one of the at least six major variations of the Big Muff based tone stack during the build unless you socketed components, which is a nightmare in a production pedal. I ultimately went with a fairly scooped mids version - the '75 Ram's Head - for the primary variant. However, at the time I mentioned that I wanted to try something like what was done on the AionFX Halo board and add a three way mids switch. After some work laying out the changes to the circuit and finding a switch that would work, Steggo is proud to introduce the next iteration of the Dimetrodon Distortion, the "Deluxe" which includes a three-way switch to toggle between three tone stack modes!

A Long and Winding (Development) Road - The Dimetrodon Distortion is Finally Done!

When I started building guitar pedals a few years ago I had a couple of initial goals in mind. First, I wanted better (and affordable) access to guitar pedals that were expensive, esoteric, out of production, or often a combination of all three. Second, I'd always had an interest in electronics (I work as a materials chemist in the semiconductor industry, and my uncle was always good with electronics), so building my own pedals seemed like a great vector to develop my skills in an area that I'd long neglected. As with most people new to the hobby, I started with professionally produced PCBs which were clones of the pedals I wanted build. However the further I delved into the hobby, the more I wanted to start making something different or unique - which gave rise to the idea of creating my own distortion pedal using a classic pedal as a base. 

A little over a year ago I posted an article with my hand-etched prototypes of the Dimetrodon Distortion pedal. It basically took the MXR Distortion+ and added a Big Muff tone stack and a gain recovery stage. It was okay, but after I'd built it and tested it, there were problems. It tended to pop a fair amount because of where the volume and gain recovery were located in the circuit. I tried solving this with pull-down resistors, buffers, you name it, but it just didn't quite fix the issue. So I decided to take a step back and see if I could re-engineer the pedal a bit better, and now a year later - it's finally done!

Dimetrodon Distortion prototype enclosure