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I had a wonderful time building this kit, but now that it is all assembled I’m running into a few issues sound wise.
When I use the pedal on its own (nothing else in between my guitar and my amp) it has a pretty muted tone. Low frequencies are very woolly and higher frequencies are pretty much not present at all. I have double checked the HPF and LPF DIP switch setting and they match the written settings in the build manual. Curiously, these written instructions seem to be the exact mirror image of the graphical depiction of the setting found in both the build and owners manuals. I’m planning on experimenting with different DIP switch settings in hopes of getting the tone where I want it but in the meantime I thought it might be useful to call attention to this potentially confusing discrepancy in the Quaverato’s literature.
The second issue is a bit more confounding. When I use the Quaverato with other pedals in front of it my overall tone gets unbearably bright and harsh sounding. This happens with drive pedals as well as delays and other modulation effects. Any insight as to why that might be happening would be much appreciated.
TimTom,
Thanks for bringing that manual discrepancy to our attention, but upon reviewing the manuals i’m not sure what written instructions and image are referring to in the manuals. We definitely want to make the manuals as clear a possible so I’m really interested in making these changes…so let me know what image and pages you are referring to.
It sounds like you will have to play around with the HPF and LPF trim pots to get the tone you are after. Just to make sure both optocouplers are working correctly, start up the pedal in “calibration mode” with the depth knob off (fully counter clockwise) and adjust the harmonic mix knob so that you can tell if both optos have signal going through them. It sounds like they are probably both working because of the issue of it sounding very bright when driven by another pedal…but just double check, if you haven’t already. But the brightness thing is an interesting issue. I think this is happening because the high frequencies have much less impedance getting into the pedal than the low frequencies (because of C1). You should be able to adjust down the HPF trim pot to make up for this. Another fix would be to put a capacitor in parallel with R3 to keep the high frequencies from being amplified/buffered by U2A. If you want to try this (it shouldn’t be necessary) , a 1nF cap would roll off at 15kHz, that would probably be a good value to start with.
Good luck…and please let me know about that manual discrepancy.
-Brach
I am also experiencing a very wooly tone – most of the high end is cut out in calibration mode (depth fully counter clockwise) and the issue persists when engaging the tremolo.
tlp,
The point of calibration mode is to individually adjust each filter side (high and low). In this mode only one or the other filter side is working at at time depending on how the harmonic mix knob is set. It sounds like the low side is working properly…being that you get a woolly tone when the harmonic mix knob is set to the “low” side. Is the high side of the filter working when the harmonic mix knob is set to the “high” side? If the high side isn’t letting signal through then that would explain the woolly tone.
If both sides are working then adjust the trim pots until the brightness comes back and the woollyness is diminished.
What did you mean when you said “the issue persists when engaging the tremolo”? Are you getting a woolly tone when the pedal is bypassed as well as engaged…or do you mean just when the depth knob is up?
-Brach
