Grail Tone

Today I completed a box for Matt Corey Productions, out of Watertown, NY. The unit, named "Grail tone," is a colour box designed to impart character and vibe on anything passing through its circuitry.

The photo does not represent the final version, which has some extra components and a slightly different layout. There are 2 sets of controls on Grail Tone. The main control is for tone specifically. It has 4 choices as follows: Smooth, Focused, Vintage and Lo-Fi. The second control is the Bypass. The Bypass switch has 3 modes of operation. The unit is either active, bypassed (true bypass), or what's been dubbed "The Netherworld," which is some weird freak of science/accidental engineering. The Netherworld is neither fully active, nor completely bypassed... and sounds different from the normal mode. The Vintage setting on The Netherworld setting is pretty awesome!

Inside this holy grail of tone are some of my hand made components, such as my paper in oil capacitors and an inductor. I also used some exotic non-inductive wire-wound resistors and wired the whole thing up with silver plated teflon insulated wire.  Input transformer is a Jensen and the color transformer was a crummy power transformer that I repurposed.