Combination delay and spring reverb unit
As my interest in tape delay was in full swing by this point, it was inevitable that I would end up learning about Roland's famous tape unit.
A favourite in Dub, Reggae, and often used as a gimmicky focal point in mixes, when it wasn't adding lush unpredictable swirls of background echo.
Having reached quite a revered status online and amongst gearheads like myself.
It almost seems like your studio isn't really a studio without one of these and a pair of NS-10's!
With prices going up and reliability going down on these units, the attraction seems to have slipped from having a usable piece of gear to just owning a collectors item. Always a shame.
Anyway, the idea was to make a functionally and aesthetically correct but legally distinct version which would actually get used on some mixes and not just to collect dust.
I made 3 of these units simply because the process for the front panels seemed economic that way.
However the final unit sat around unfinished for a few months because I ran out of bits, It was then just shifted as parts. Speaking of which...
The Parts
Some old furniture chipboard for the box
broken metal digibox/dvd player lid bent to shape for the front panel
Similar VU's sourced on Ebay (Around £5 each)
Tayda for pots and switches etc. (Maybe £10-20)
Paints and lacquers
Salvaged reverb tank
Perf/proto PC Board
PT2399 IC
other scrap wire and components
The Case
The Size was determined by the width of the furniture off-cuts again, and made long enough to ensure I could house the reverb tank. Just butt joints screwed through from the outside.
The empty shell was then covered with some thick vinyl stuff which resembled tolex but came free from a boatyard sometime ago.
The front panels were measured, bent to shape with pliers and some lengths of metal from the scrap pile, this was before I got a vice so it was not even approaching perfect. the holes for pots, switches and the VU were drilled and filed, test fitted then some more filing.
The front was sprayed with the colours and some clever placement of cutout legend markings, these were inverted before B+W laser printing then blended into the black background nicely.
Then a few clear coats, taking care on the first couple to only lightly 'dust' them.
(this is important because lacquer will melt the laser printed words!)
The Electronics
There were some simple ideas behind each section of the project but putting them all together took some time.I learned a lot about how different VU meters can behave and some of the ways to integrate them if your circuit doesn't have enough juice to move the needle. Although I don't make any claims about it's accuracy, it does look good, and works well as a reference when you get used to it.
You can break down the internals like this
Power supply
Input mixer, buffer and splitter
Reverb Circuit
Echo Circuit
Selector switch
Post mixer
VU and clip light
There are a few options when you are making multi-effects and after trying a couple of different paths for the audio I settled on the most usable and jammed it together. You can probably hear the order of the effects in the video.
The switch, as per the original unit gives the option of dry, just echo, just reverb or both.
The circuits, if you are curious, are straight out of the datasheets with the exception of the reverb.
This was slightly modified from the 'CENTRE STAGE SPRING REVERB' design which can be found on many DIY guitar effect sites
They were all drawn out in block diagram form on the back of a napkin first, as is standard procedure.
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