One of my favorite pedals that I've built to date has to be the Orange Preamp emulator. I've read comments like "That pedal has the sound that I have in my head" and "Big, loud, fat and punchy", just to name a few. This pedal uses four Jfet transistors to emulate the tubes with the EQ section before the gain stage in the circuit. I built it originally just for myself, but I've now built a few more of them for people that just had to have one. The first four of them were built on veroboard but since I've had a ton requests for them, I decided to etch PCBs for them. Making them on vero actually takes me a lot less time since etching the board, and then hand drilling all of the tiny component mounting holes takes me way more time than building up a vero, but, IMO, the end result has a 'cleaner' look to it..
The first prototype PCB, (shown above) has four trimpots to bias the four Jfets. The trimpots are set to their optimum bias so please DO NOT attempt to adjust them. This pedal sells for $299 +10 shipping in the contUSA. I realize that it is very expensive for a preamp pedal, but it is completely made by hand and I personally do all of the etching, soldering and testing on each one myself. I will not be making any more than 10 of these since I just don't have the time to be building pedals for sale, and since I've sold all 10, no more are available.
