Bread Board Tube Screamer: Stage One Complete

That's right! We've been rambling about this for months, and we have finally gotten the time (and components) to commence our first bread boarding project.




And as We-Verb tradition dictates, that is a beer in the background (Lagunitas IPA for anyone interested):




And our completed breadboard! It now only awaits us making connections, and then the testing... oh the testing. More on that to come...



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In additional unrelated news, BlytheRocks had to go up to San Francisco last week for a work event held at Fort Mason, and holy crap look what I found:



Now any self respecting audio enthusiast who looks at that and doesn't think "I want to take an impulse response of that space" is probably a little unbalanced and shook seek professional help. And just when you thought it couldn't get any better...


Boo-ya! Printed PCB with components still in:



And all of this brings up a very important point: Never go anywhere without recording equipment. I may use this as an excuse to buy a Zoom H4n

SCA: N72

Why yes, we have purchased a Neve clone from SCA.

Be prepared.

The Long-Awaited Preamp Shootout!!

Yes, we have finally waded through the murky, and uncharted-since-university-3-years-ago waters of the first half of a real academic semester, and we are here to boast the results of a preamp shootout that took place over a month ago, that we just haven't had time to share.

[Yeah, I know, worst excuse ever. The actual scenario was that AR and I got abducted by the Digidesign gods.... and... and... yeah, no, I've got nothing.]
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The C84 was amazingly easy to construct. It took us about 4-5 hours total, and it worked on the first try.

Here is our PCB in the "final" stages:


Just as we had opened what we call our "Final Stage Beer"... we discovered that we had 17 more pages of wiring the damn thing to the power supply in the chassis. No pictures of that part... we were a little too annoyed to take pictures, so we probably supplemented that with another "First Stage of Final Stage Beer":


Andddd... we jump to the ultimate tier of construction: Completion with functionality! You can tell it works from the giant LED... you see it there? Yeah you do.



Here it is ladies and gentlemen, the shootout:

Mbox2 with Focusrite preamps:


Seventh Circle Audio C84:


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Coming soon to We-Verb (no, really):

- We will be doing a couple microphone mods... a minor one and a major! More details to follow.

Happy New Year from We-Verb!

That's right! We celebrated New Years day the same way as the rest of you, with a glass of bubbly and a nice hot soldering iron to keep you warm. (Also, please ignore the monitors in the background, we are borrowing them to test them out... we will go into failure another time.)

We just wanted to give you a quick update, we have dove in to soldering components to the PCB on the C84 from Seventh Circle Audio.

First we had the painstaking task of sorting through the 150 or so electrical components and parts, matching them up to the Bill of Materials, just to make sure that everything was there. Clearly, the most fun was the tiny resistors, where their value is indicated from several colored bands that each stand for a number, and since the people who came up with this system were not art students, a lot of the colors look similar.

Luckily we have a digital multimeter, so we were able to verify the resistor values accurately. Also, for anyone else pursuing a project like this, once we found the value of the component, we put a piece of tape on it and wrote where it goes (e.g. R22, means resistor 22, which is silk-screened on the PCB):



We will post more as it happens! Since I'm sure you're dying to see it... yes, here is another gratuitous PCB shot:

Green Ring Oscillator Guitar Pedal

Our first DIY audio project, for your aural pleasure:

First part is the clean guitar signal, then it decrescendos and the next part you hear is our pedal in all of its' glory! (at 27 seconds, for anyone who is counting)

Enjoy.

(Also, I figured out the audio >> blog thing, so definitely more coming soon!)