Earthbound Audio Pale Mare  [traced]

General documentation, gut shot, schematic links, ongoing circuit tracing, deep thoughts ... all about boutique stompboxes.
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Gila_Crisis
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Post by Gila_Crisis »

I'm seeking for this pedal since a while. I only know it's a relative of the Roland AF100 BeeBaa (fuzz only, without the booster).
I was able to find a gut shot on reverb, and by roughly comparing it with a regular Roland BeeBaa schematic, I came to the conclusion that it shall be something like this.
PCB is double sided, so I can 't properly tell all the connections.
What do you think?
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Gila_Crisis
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Post by Gila_Crisis »

I had a chat with Mr. Earthbound Audio himself, and he was kind enough to share some technical details about the Pale Male!

The scoop filter can either be tuned like the BeeBaa (47k/22k/2.2.nF/100nF, scoop center 330Hz) or the Superfuzz (22k/10k/1nF/100nF, scoop center 1100Hz, schematic shows now the SF values), so feel free to experiment.
The Mid/Filter pot is A100k between the 100nF cap and ground.
The Gate instead is not a starve control as I supposed on my first attempt, but it's a simple, switchable 10k Bias pot in parallel with the 15k resistor between Q3's Base and Ground (but EA invited to tune it to taste, to have more or less gating range).

This said I would like to call the schematic traced and confirmed.
As you can see the EA tweaks to the circuit are not so invasive, so you can apply these to any already available standard Roland BeeBaa layout or PCBs.

Myself I will soon assemble a Beebaa fuzz with the Pale Mare tweaks using a Aion FX PCBs (their Ibex PCBs is for the BeeBaa, got this one because it has a mid range trim pot already implemented) and a pair more twists from my sleeve: move the fuzz pot after Q1 stage (more like on a Big Muff) and maybe also use a Mass/Bass input cap blend pot (see the EA Supercollider), and a switch to shift the mid scoop center frequency (BB 330Hz or SF 1100Hz).
PaleMareV2.png
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prelich
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Post by prelich »

Very cool mods to the BeeBaa. I recently built a first batch of my own take on the BeeBaa, the Gorgon Fuzz. Included a bias control more like a typical starve, and expanded on the idea of having two channels. The first channel runs through a Big Muff style filter to dial in more lows or highs for a full sound. The second channel runs through the notch filter and lets you shift the frequency of it. You can dial in the stock BeeBaa scoop, the Superfuzz scoop and anything in between.

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Gila_Crisis
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Post by Gila_Crisis »

Very cool, I took a look at the demo your pedal:it's a cool take on the BeeBaa! I like the idea you had with the 2 tone-shift controls!
For my BeeBaa/Pale Mare I got also some MPSA13/14/18 to test in Q1 (for example the EA Supercollider use a MPSA13 in Q1).
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