{"id":2564,"date":"2018-09-05T15:02:56","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T21:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tekhedd.com\/?p=2564"},"modified":"2018-09-05T15:15:14","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T21:15:14","slug":"how-did-i-get-here-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/?p=2564","title":{"rendered":"How did I get here anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Passive

Passive Crossover #1<\/p><\/div>\n

What I really wanted was to buy<\/em> a bass-appropriate blend pedal. Or two.\u00a0 Maybe even three. “If you want a thing done right, buy the pro model and a good road case<\/strong>.” Those are words to live by. And I would have, but there wasn’t one to buy! I found a lot of good pedals that were almost right: A really nice bass crossover pedal with an obvious frequency hole right in the middle of the bass range. Several traditional blend pedals that only do full-range, and one huge blender with tone controls. Like my pedalboard isn’t already huge enough.<\/p>\n

So I thought: I’ll keep this simple. I made simple passive crossovers, and\u00a0 hacked together pedalboards out of hand-made passive crossovers and buffered blend pedals and lots of patch cables. My pedalboard became large. It worked acceptably, right up until the point where I realized I also needed a phase switch.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, making a phase inverter is a bit more work than a simple passive crossover.<\/p>\n

If you want a thing done right, be prepared for it to consume all of your free time forever<\/h2>\n

At which point I sort of snapped. “I’m an engineer! I’ll just make one!” I thought. And that though quickly combined with “Why stop at just one?” and “Surely there are other bassists out there who have the same problem!” And then I spent all of my New Years break running spice simulations.<\/p>\n

I could be finished by summer! Within a year at worst.<\/p>\n

19 months is a year, right?<\/p>\n

\"Early

Early Prototypes<\/p><\/div>\n

Design of the crossover and blend circuits went smoothly. “Wow, this is going to be easier than I thought!” I thought to myself in a textbook example of foreshadowing. As it turns out, the actual audio circuit is the easy part. There’s power supply, headroom considerations, and protection circuitry to consider. After two prototypes I gave up on capacitor-coupled designs. By fall, Sugar Britches had a switching power supply, was DC coupled, and prototypes were on my pedalboard going to shows.<\/p>\n

This is the reason that the first production model is GB-5…there were 4 prototype designs before this one.<\/p>\n

Road case sold separately<\/h2>\n

There was no need for additional development at this point. I could just quit! But what the heck, I came this far. So I spent the next 7 months getting the packaging and production together, to the point where I’m reasonably happy with the result.<\/p>\n

Sure, there’s room for improvement. Sugar Britches may not be perfect, but it’s the best damn bass blender available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What I really wanted was to buy a bass-appropriate blend pedal. Or two.\u00a0 Maybe even three. “If you want a thing done right, buy the pro model and a good road case.” Those are words to live by. And I would have, but there wasn’t one to buy! I found a lot of good pedals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[294,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-byteheaven-dev","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2570,"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions\/2570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhedd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}