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The Sushi Box FX Secret Society

So I'm still ahead of my original November 10th deadline, but I'm a little behind my optimistic schedule, things keep getting in the way :p But I just finished the first of teh October batch, so if order #1 is yours, this is your pedal. I'm hoping to get at least 10 done tonight, but we'll have to see how that goes. I'll update everyone before I go to bed :p
View attachment 4031962
Yay! There she is - can't wait to plug her in!
 
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Yay! There she is - can't wait to plug her in!
Speaking of which, I haven't shipped the finished ones yet because I just remembered I promised I would record a demo of the Dr. Wattson, so I wanted to do that real quick before I get them out :P I'm getting set up to do that now, and I plan to box up the ones that are finished (I'm up to 6 right now) and drop them off at the post office during my lunch break. So if you have order number 1 - 6, you'll be getting an email with tracking in the next couple hours :)
 
Speaking of which, I haven't shipped the finished ones yet because I just remembered I promised I would record a demo of the Dr. Wattson, so I wanted to do that real quick before I get them out :p I'm getting set up to do that now, and I plan to box up the ones that are finished (I'm up to 6 right now) and drop them off at the post office during my lunch break. So if you have order number 1 - 6, you'll be getting an email with tracking in the next couple hours :)
I don't suppose you can ship a sausage patty pizza from Gino's with mine? I miss it so much....
 
Is that a little trim pot inside the one on the right? I love inside pics, almost more than the outside. I'm the weirdo that opens everything before I even plug it in, to me with these boutique builders, half of the art is inside. Some of these are amazing, even with pcb. A lot of works goes in to these small enclosures. You're probably already aware but there is a few good builder facebook groups out there, folks have gone CRAZY with some staying in doors over the summer
 
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Is that a little trim pot inside the one on the right? I love inside pics, almost more than the outside. I'm the weirdo that opens everything before I even plug it in, to me with these boutique builders, half of the art is inside. Some of these are amazing, even with pcb. A lot of works goes in to these small enclosures. You're probably already aware but there is a few good builder facebook groups out there, folks have gone CRAZY with some staying in doors over the summer
Yup, the trim pot is for adjusting the high voltage power supply. I ship everything with it set between 200 and 210V, and I don't recommend touching it, but they can reasonably be adjusted up to 240V without damaging anything. If anyone is confident enough in their skills shoot me a message and I can walk you through how to do that and where to measure ;)

I definitely put a lot more work into the inside of the pedals than the outside, but if you can make the outside look nice too, may as well do it :P There are some AMAZING builders out there that do insanely neat work. Most of what I know I learned from forums (a degree in engineering doesn't hurt, but anyway :P), and I will always enjoy looking at other people's builds.
Not worried about getting Sass on the patty? :smug:
That's a legitimate concern, excess levels of sass can easily seep into meat products :P
 
Now we need a pizza named pedal...
Could work for the LA-1A. I know the "LA" stands for Leveling Amplifier, but it just makes me think of Los Angeles, so I wanted to think of a Chicago-based name for it. I was leaning towards "Chicago Skyline," but honestly "DEEP DISH COMPRESSOR" has a nice ring to it :P
 
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Yup, the trim pot is for adjusting the high voltage power supply. I ship everything with it set between 200 and 210V, and I don't recommend touching it, but they can reasonably be adjusted up to 240V without damaging anything. If anyone is confident enough in their skills shoot me a message and I can walk you through how to do that and where to measure ;)

I definitely put a lot more work into the inside of the pedals than the outside, but if you can make the outside look nice too, may as well do it :p There are some AMAZING builders out there that do insanely neat work. Most of what I know I learned from forums (a degree in engineering doesn't hurt, but anyway :p), and I will always enjoy looking at other people's builds.

That's a legitimate concern, excess levels of sass can easily seep into meat products :p


I was actually wanting to ask that. How did you get into pedal building? Any applicable experience prior to pedals?
 
That's a legitimate concern, excess levels of sass can easily seep into meat products :p
They ALL come with one?! very cool, and I understand to not go crazy adjusting things you don't know, but having the option under proper instruction is an awesome addition!
Everyone take this into consideration with 2nd hand SushiBoxs, similarly to getting a 9v pedal that was accidently fed a 24v supply - know your source, better yet buy direct @Sushi Box FX !
 
I was actually wanting to ask that. How did you get into pedal building? Any applicable experience prior to pedals?
Well I hope you're ready for some reading :P

So it actually started my very first semester of university. In my introduction to circuits class our final project was just to "build something," the professor didn't care what, he just wanted us to get our feet wet with electronics. I was dirt poor at the time and couldn't really afford pedals, and my lab partner also played guitar, so we (I, he was afraid of soldering :P) built a Matsumin Valvecaster, which is a 9V 12AU7 overdrive. It took me like 20 tries to get it right, but I was blown away by the sound I got from $30 worth of components and some hard work. Then at the end of the semester I was showing it off to a friend, and he offered my $120 for it :P And that got my starving-college-student brain working, and I started building more and more complicated stuff and mostly selling it locally by word-of-mouth. I've always been a mediocre guitarist so I had trouble really breaking into the music scene that way, but after a couple years there was at least one Sushi Box pedal in every local band's lineup, so I was part of the scene :P

So I guess that was the start, but I completed my bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and got a job as a circuit designer, which was REALLY good practice. Designing 16-layer circuit boards for aircraft computers makes 2-layer circuit boards for pedals seem pretty simple :P One of the areas I worked in at work dealt with maintaining obsolete radar equipment, which meant a workshop full of old military tubes, and that's where I got into the submini tubes you're still seeing in my builds. I was still pretty small, doing one pedal a month or so, but then DirtyDuke from here came accross a Particle Accelerator, and now I can't build fast enough to keep up with all the tube-hungry bassists :P

/endHistoryLesson

They ALL come with one?! very cool, and I understand to not go crazy adjusting things you don't know, but having the option under proper instruction is an awesome addition!
Everyone take this into consideration with 2nd hand SushiBoxs, similarly to getting a 9v pedal that was accidently fed a 24v supply - know your source, better yet buy direct @Sushi Box FX !
Yup, every tube pedal I build has a trimpot for adjusting the high voltage. One of the reasons I like using SMD is because I like to think people are less likely to try to mod it without knowing what they are doing. I have no problem with people trying to figure out what's going on in my pedals and I will happily share schematics with anyone that asks, but I don't want anyone getting hurt.
 
Could work for the LA-1A. I know the "LA" stands for Leveling Amplifier, but it just makes me think of Los Angeles, so I wanted to think of a Chicago-based name for it. I was leaning towards "Chicago Skyline," but honestly "DEEP DISH COMPRESSOR" has a nice ring to it :p
How about the Deep Dish Octave,
And the Calzone Compressor
 
my wife says it looks like the pedal has a huge forehead
Hah, the first one I saw with everything shifted half-way down, this meme came to mind because the pedal had no 'nose' area:
88e35981b1d3e73f93fdbd6baa18222f--celebrity-gallery-jack-nicholson.jpg
 
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Mr Sushi Box,

Obviously you make pedals with toobz in'em.

A while back, you mentioned a prototype tubescreamer style pedal.


I was browsing Sweetwater, looking for drives that might work on bass, and found this
Ibanez Nu Tubescreamer Overdrive Pedal with Nutube
It has a different style of tube in it called a Nutube.

Vox had done a line of pedals with these nutubes, based on amps they've done.

Do you have any experience with these? (The nutubes themselves, not the pedals)
 
Do you have any experience with these? (The nutubes themselves, not the pedals)
So yes and no. I've never personally designed anything around a nutube due to the cost, they're around $50 per tube. If they were as miraculous as Korg/Vox claimed they were it would almost be worth the price, but reading through the datasheet they don't seem that great to be honest. Their big selling point is low power consumption. The filaments run at 0.7V, compared to a 12AX7 type tube's 6.3V, and they pull 34mA, compared to 300mA for the 12AX7 (150mA if you run it at 12V). That's awesome, really great. But let's look deeper.

The Nutube has a max plate voltage of 80V. Not a deal-breaker, but generally lower plate voltage means less output (my Large Hadron Collider runs 90V tubes and is WAY quieter than Particle Accelerator). Still not a huge deal. But let's look at the mu, or amplification factor. 6N21B, the mini tubes I use in my pedals, have a mu of about 80. For reference a 12AX7 has a mu of 100 and 12AT7 has a mu of 60, so 6N21B is right in between the two. Well the Nutube has a mu of 12. That's right, TWELVE. A 12AU7, the lowest gain tube I've ever used in audio, has a mu of 20.

What does mu mean to your ears? On paper they refer to mu as amplification factor, so you can think of it simply as gain. If you have an amplifier with 12AX7 in the preamp and put 12AT7 in their place, what happens? Big drop in gain, the amp won't drive as hard, may not even drive at all depending on the setup. So how do they make such a low-gain tube work in an overdrive? Well simple, the tube isn't doing the driving. 100% of the nutube designs I have seen are pushing the tube with either an op-amp or a FET in front of it.

To summarize though, how do they sound? They sound fine. I've personally tried a couple of the Nutube "hybrid" amplifiers they released a while back, and they sound good. Do they sound good enough to justify the price of the tube? In my opinion, not even close.

Sorry for the super long answer to a simple question, but there you go :p
 
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