Dr Boogey Build (Day 2)
Finally, the beast is alive!!!! After weeks of debugging, i finally succeed! Right after all the parts arrived, i wired everything up. Thought quite a lot about positioning of the knobs though when the drilling the enclosure.
The problem started right away after everything was wired up. Got sound when bypassed (using true bypass) but nothing when enganged! Damn! Checked all the solder and wiring, everything looked ok. Then, i took the jfet's reading and post it at diystompboxes.com forum. The guys told me that the voltages of my Q1 and Q2 (the jfet's) weren't right. At Q1 the voltages were nearly the same for all feet (D, S and G) while at Q2, there's no voltage at S while G shows high voltages reading. I replaced the Q1 with an j201 laying around (used for the MT2 mod but took it out) but still nothing. Then decided to resolder the components around Q1 coz my soldering job there was f****ng bad! and walla! there's sound coming out of the box... but DAMN it was ugly! very fizzy and thin!
Asked again at the forum and the guys suggested that it was the Q2 that might caused it. So i ordered up some j201's from farnell with sets of sockets too! See, as explained by ultraman_cosmo (from jamtank.net), jfets are very sensitive to heat. so, by using socket, i won't worry bout frying up the j201. and i can easily swaps the jfets coz apparently, each jfet (even same type) can affect the end sound!
Then, all soldered up, setting the drain voltages of Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 to 4.5v, i fired it up! And the beast; Dr Boogey is alive!!!!!
The tone? fat sounding distortion with lots of balls! haha. suprisingly very quiet though. but still need some jfet biasing to be done to really nail the tone that i want. However, recoded a clip using my digital camera. It sounds kinda 'tubey' though the clips but can get you the rough idea.
Here's some pictures 1st..
Last but not least, the demo!
