ratherdashing
Kablamminator
Back story:
A few years ago, I built a pedal called the FTL Drive. It was a TS circuit with a few major changes: six position selectable clip circuit, additional EQ controls, and a foot-switchable gain boost. I liked it so much that I decided to offer a production run of them to the people on the forum. I built two runs of ten, and sold all of them.
It was a difficult pedal to build (mainly due to my less-than-stellar enclosure layout) so I retired it after two runs. However, I still had a stack of FTL Drive PCB's, so I decided to turn them into something else. The result of that was the Raptor - a simplified version of the FTL Drive. It had two clip/gain settings instead of six, a simplified EQ, and no foot-switchable boost. I set the price nice and low and sold out the entire run in less than 24 hours. I really like the Raptor. I built myself one and it's still on my pedal board.
After the Raptor run was completed, I toyed with the idea of doing another design. My life was going through a massive upheaval at the time though, and I didn't want to take on that much responsibility. Honestly, designing a pedal is fun, but building a dozen pedals is many hours of mindless, repetitive labour. So I scrapped the idea, decided to forget about pedal builds, and focused on other things in my life.
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About a year and a half has passed since I shipped the last Raptor. A lot has happened in my life since then - most of it good. Lately I've toyed with the idea of doing a run of pedals again. Yes, the manual labour involved is obnoxious, but I learned a lot about design and layout from my Raptor/FTL experiences, and I think I can streamline the process a lot. More importantly, I miss being able to help people find their tone. The most rewarding thing for me was reading posts about how happy people were with their pedals, and how they were using them.
So, I've decided to take another crack at building pedals. I'll talk about my design idea in the next post ...
A few years ago, I built a pedal called the FTL Drive. It was a TS circuit with a few major changes: six position selectable clip circuit, additional EQ controls, and a foot-switchable gain boost. I liked it so much that I decided to offer a production run of them to the people on the forum. I built two runs of ten, and sold all of them.
It was a difficult pedal to build (mainly due to my less-than-stellar enclosure layout) so I retired it after two runs. However, I still had a stack of FTL Drive PCB's, so I decided to turn them into something else. The result of that was the Raptor - a simplified version of the FTL Drive. It had two clip/gain settings instead of six, a simplified EQ, and no foot-switchable boost. I set the price nice and low and sold out the entire run in less than 24 hours. I really like the Raptor. I built myself one and it's still on my pedal board.
After the Raptor run was completed, I toyed with the idea of doing another design. My life was going through a massive upheaval at the time though, and I didn't want to take on that much responsibility. Honestly, designing a pedal is fun, but building a dozen pedals is many hours of mindless, repetitive labour. So I scrapped the idea, decided to forget about pedal builds, and focused on other things in my life.
--------
About a year and a half has passed since I shipped the last Raptor. A lot has happened in my life since then - most of it good. Lately I've toyed with the idea of doing a run of pedals again. Yes, the manual labour involved is obnoxious, but I learned a lot about design and layout from my Raptor/FTL experiences, and I think I can streamline the process a lot. More importantly, I miss being able to help people find their tone. The most rewarding thing for me was reading posts about how happy people were with their pedals, and how they were using them.
So, I've decided to take another crack at building pedals. I'll talk about my design idea in the next post ...
