Project overview
What happens when you mix a Rat with an Octaver and a Booster? TOTAL DOOM. That is the secret behind EQD hyped Life Pedal, that one that was sold out after a few hours of being released. But you don’t have to wait any longer for long waiting lists or pay a huge ton of money to DOOM your tone; now you can build it your own with our PCBs!
Introduction
Hyped hyped hyped for a reason is the EQD life pedal ™ that takes the concept of good old Rat ™ pedal to the next level by adding a Green ringer octave circuit In front and a clean boost after. That gives you the ultimate doom machine that’s just out of stock within hours whenever EQD does a new run. So we thought we help you out by giving you a DIY board. Honestly, we are a little late with our design. To make a difference to all the other guys offering boards, we made our take as small and pedalboard-friendly as possible and designed it to fit in a 125B with two footswitches and a toggle for clipping option.
If you receive v1.2, you can skip this part. For the guys who receive one of the boards from the giveaway, the toggle to switch the octave on and off (DPDT) is too close to the clipping toggle (SPDT). You either place one of the switches somewhere on the side of the enclosure and run wires or jumper the octave switch that’s not added to the final version anymore because you have the potentiometer as well; that makes that toggle a little pointless anyways. To jumper it, you run two wires both from the middle pad to the pad towards the side of the footswitches (bottom), as shown in the picture. Please don’t get confused; in the picture, I also added a single jumper for the clipping option because I didn’t want to have the toggle out of the center.
All this has been corrected for the final 1.2 version.
Controls
- Volume
- Gain
- Octave
- Filter
- Booster
- Diode Switch
For any technical questions regarding this build don’t forget to check out our Facebook Group and our forum at Free Stomp Boxes.
Roy Swandol (verified owner) –
Great Pedal. Diode 1 and 2 are drawn backwards on the schematic and on the PCB. Flip them around and it sounds amazing. Great pedal.
Sten Seegel (verified owner) –
Top quality board! Also fits in a Hammond 1550B which is only a little bit bigger than the standard 1590B.
The recommended values for R1, R2, R3 and C1 produce quite a heavy lowpass at the input. Other schematics use 1M for R1 & R3, 1k for R2 and 100p for C1. This will give you more of the tone you would expect from a RAT circuit. See what suits you best.