First Look Ronsonic Diesel Driver

Here's the big, bad buffer. The Ronsonic Diesel Driver. Plug 9 - 18VDC into the jack at the top and your guitar into the jack you see on the side there.

The input impedance is matched to that of classic guitar amps. This will not load down your guitar. It also won't give it that unpleasant brittle, glassy top end that some buffers with extremely high input impedances do.

The goal here was transparency, as if nothing was added to your guitar and nothing taken away.

Then you go around to this side:

The top jack goes out to your tuner. It has its own buffer so nothing that happens there can affect your signal. Some tuners are infamous tone-hogs that will kill signal even off on a side chain. That won't happen here.

The next jack is the Send to your pedal board. This is buffered with a state-of-the-art opamp that can drive any load that will be encountered in the wild. Prototypes were built with more usual opamps that sounded good but didn't have these spec's, now we are way ahead of the bunch with great sound and impeccable technical spec's.

The third jack down is the Return from your board.

The bottom jack goes to your amp. Again this is seriously buffered and fully capable of driving huge runs of cable without signal loss. For large stages and ever more common isolation boxes this will get your signal to the amp intact and sounding great.

The switch can either bypass your pedalboard or work as a mute, silencing everything except the tuner out. Choose this option when you order. It can be changed with a simple soldered in jumper by any reasonably competent tech should you change your mind later. If you prefer, a user selectable jumper can be added at a slight extra charge. We don't recommend this as this should be a more or less permanent decision and even with the gold plated connectors we prefer the reliability of soldered connections.

Legends are hand marked on the bottom since we don't anticipate this being plugged and unplugged a lot. Mostly this will get installed on the board and forgotten except to step on it when it's time to tune. You can order top markings if you prefer in legible technician hand lettering.

We are taking orders now, no payment until we are ready to ship in 2-4 weeks. Price is $129 plus $8 flat rate shipping in the USofA.

Please email if you are interested in getting a free test run with the prototype.

Hero / Guru Pedal

Just got some photos in of a current Hero/Guru dual pedal.

Pretty huh?

Here's the gut shot. Because it should be pretty on the inside too.

New Circuit Boards On The Way

Big news on several projects.

The big project for the last couple of months has been preparing the new Diesel Drive Buffer for production. This is the monster buffer project that I described previously. The original target price of $100 is now deemed hopeless, too many compromises would be necessary to get there. It would still be a better than typical product, but why do "better" when "awesome" is within reach. This does not use your usual twelve cent transistors or fifty cent ICs; it is all top shelf parts all the way. And this is an application that will reward the investment.

The order has been placed with the board house for prototypes of the new circuit board. They will be here in a couple of weeks and we'll get this thing off the breadboard and onto the pedalboard for some serious workouts. It's very hard to demonstrate a buffer pedal in a recording of video, but I've got a few ideas about how to show what this beast can do.

I am also revisiting a couple of classics. The Hero Overdrive and Electric Guru Treble Booster are also getting new circuit board designs. These boards will both speed production and produce a more reliable pedal. None of the existing pedals have had any circuit related failures, but these will just be that much more robust.

Thanks for checking in, I'll keep you posted on any new developments.

Update from the Bench

Things have been quiet on the blog here lately. Pedal and amp repairs are the priority, I don't get to play when I've got someone's gear setting there on my bench eager to go home and make music.

Tbe Big Bad Buffer with no name is coming along nicely. The design has made it off the breadboard and the prototype PCB layout is coming together. I still need a name for it, was thinking "Diesel Drive" but still looking for ideas. This is a fun project for me since it is one of the few where the published specifications are meaningful to the design. Most of the time with pedals we are torturing and abusing the technology to create interesting sounds. This is one of the few cases where we really want things like low distortion and huge, clean headroom.

On the back burner are the parts and drawings for my recreation of the legendary Roland AP-7 Jet Phaser. If you remember the Isley Brother's song Who's That Lady, you know the sound. It's a combination eight stage (yes, 8 stages, like double Phase 90s) phase shifter with an integrated distortion circuit (the "Jet" part of the name) to push it into a completely new range of sound. This is a remarkably complex device that has never been reissued or reproduced since back in the day. This is one of those things that I wanted and couldn't afford when I was a kid and for the collectors price they sell for now, well it's time for my clone. Here's another example of what this pedal can do by the great Larry Graham and a great wrap up to this post:

On the Drawing Board - The Buffer

Got a couple of projects in the works I'd like to talk about a bit.

First, is the new buffer. This is actually a triple buffer designed to go onto a pedal board and fill all the buffer / driver / splitter needs anyone might normally have. The basic idea is, guitar goes in, there's a separate, isolated output for the tuner. This keeps the tuner off the signal path, some tuners are tone suck disasters, even when used in a branch off the signal path. This fixes that problem. There's a buffered output to the pedals, and a return. Then another buffer to drive the line to the amp.

Here's the jacks:
Guitar input
Tuner Out
Buffered Out to pedalboard.
Return from pedalboard.
Buffered Out to amp.
The stomp switch can be internally selected to either mute for tuning or bypass the pedalboard.

Technologically, this thing is a monster. It runs well on 9VDC, and even better at 18, and is safe anywhere up to 24 Volts. It uses some very serious modern IC technology instead of the usual buffers and antique opamps you see in other pedals. The dedicated Tuner Out uses a typical FET buffer stage since we don't really care what the tuner sounds like, we just want to isolate it from the rest of the signal path. Truth be told, you could run the Tuner Out into an amp or pedal and it wouldn't sound any worse than the other buffers on the market.

The design challenge now is developing this pedal to the point that we retain all the features in a compact format. Yes, this all fits in a standard "MXR" type box. And, I'm trying to keep the price under $100! as low as possible, right now we're looking at $129. There are other pedals with similar features, they are larger and vastly more expensive. Oh, except none of them give you the option of having a mute or bypass switch.