Calvin Vai

Project overview

For the love of god! Get your double-neck guitar and your animal print yoga pants ready because the audience is waiting. Forget Calvin Klein; it’s time for Calvin Vai!

Try this Jfet Emulation of the masterpiece designed by The Carvin’s engineers and Steve Vai, featuring the best of Legacy 1 and 2!

Introduction

Yes! The legendary tones of Steve Vai’s Carvin Legacy amps are now available in a compact version. Since we wanted to keep the size of this pedal as small as possible, the preamp tubes have been replaced with JFET transistors to make sure there are no compromises made to the sound. This circuit is so outstanding that you can easily skip your amp’s preamp and connect this bad horsie right to the effects loop.

The Calvin Vai board comes with 6 knobs – VOLUME, DRIVE, PRESENCE, BASS, MID, and TREBLE. With the VOLUME control you can set the loudness of the effect from barely audible, through unity gain, right to a full stadium blast. DRIVE is how you operate the saturation of the distortion – from delicate crunch to endless leads; it’s all here. The EQ section contains 4 pots – BASS, MID, TREBLE and also PRESENCE. With the first three you control the amount of low, mid and high frequencies coming out of the speaker, while PRESENCE is a fantastic tool when you want to make sure your guitar is heard in a dense mix.

You have your tone in your fingers and now you also have the tone on your pedalboard, so there are no more excuses, but to practice those sweeps until you experience erotic nightmares… and trust us, you will!

Controls

• Bass
• Drive
• Mid
• Presence
• Treb
• Volume

For any technical questions regarding this build don’t forget to check out our Facebook Group and our forum at Free Stomp Boxes.

Calvin Vai – Building Docs

Calvin Vai – Drilling Template