Monday 15 September 2014

Ibanez BB9 Bottom Booster

Here we go with one of my personal favourites. To me, the sound is simply amazing. As Dirk's notes on the schematic suggest, you won't be saving any money by building this. New ones sell for pretty cheap and one should be able to score a used one for a very decent price. I still wanted to see how compact i could possibly get this and yes, i'm rather happy with the results. I did cut a few corners though. I omitted the six 100n power decoupling caps from each opamp as adding those would have made this way bigger (let's just hope this doesn't add to noise floor). The input resistor is 12k on this layout, but to make it verbatim, you should take 5k1 and 6k1 resistors in series in its place - or a value of 11k2. I also dropped the 100k resistor and 47p cap from the output. If you want to add those, just solder them between lugs 1 & 2 of the Level pot. I also made a couple of small changes to the power supply section input. I burned the LT1044 on my original unit, and that was way easy to do. So i added series protection and a zener+100R resistor after that. Should be pretty fool proof like this. Charge pump produces +9V/-9V swing, so you're safe with your 16V rated electrolythic caps. Should be a nice fit for 1590B.

Snippet for the marketing text:
Sometimes it's best to keep it simple. Which is why, in a world of dizzying often over-complex technology, the durable, dependable, and simple stomp box continues to be the most widely used and effective means to expand, color, distort, mutate, sustain, and twist tone. The Ibanez BB9 is a booster that provides a fat bottom end with a powerful sound, perfect for the player who wants to push their amp into overdrive without losing any of their low-end. This pedal is designed to help clean tones reverberate even more and bring more intensity to a player's sound. Combine it with a distortion pedal to create of a wide variety of tone colors.



23 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Heehee :) I'm quite happy with the symmetry...
      +m

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  2. I knew Miro wouldn't be able to resist it even if ithad 6 IC's :) Thanks MIro! It so great to see this one on vero! :)

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  3. Would this turn a strat into a LP ? -;)

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    1. Why on earth would you want to do that :P

      I used my original unit for recording with a strat last spring and it does fatten everything up in a beautiful manner. But in my opinion, no. It does not hurt the strat's sound.
      +m

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    2. Ah Ah, right.
      Actually i have both, but i'm too lasy to bring both at rehearsal and i'm more a strat guy ;-)

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  4. The online demos on YouTube for this pedal are great - seems to add bottom and gain to your signal, with the option of dialing in some treble as well. However, for me, I think I would look at Timmy-type pedal to accomplish the same thing. In particular, the Timmy seems to be able to dial in the low end and treble with a modest amount of gain. But, perhaps, three 4558 op amps running at 18V gives you something a little different...

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  5. Thanks for posting, it works great. I went with the 100k/47p on the output. I didn't try it without, does it take off some treble?

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    1. Great to hear it's working! Cheers!

      100k at the pot will take a bit of overall output level out and make the level pot taper sort of "super log". The 47p is filtering RF noise and it will take some of the highest frequencies down. Shouldn't do anything too audible though...

      Thanks man! I'll tag it right away!
      +m

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  6. Forgot to mention, I swapped the gain 1's and 3's for clockwise increase, thanks Miro

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    1. Updated the wire labels just now. Thanks for the heads up too!
      +m

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  7. Excuse me i find on drawing level 1 and 3 but not the level 2 that go tu the output. Plese help to find it.

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    1. Solder a wire to lug 2 on the Level pot and solder the authorised of it to output lug on the footswitch

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    2. Thank you very much, another question the gain wires must solder a copule (A1 B1, A2 B2, A3 B3) on lug of gain potentiometer is it right? Sorry for may bad english!

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  8. No. The gain pot is dual gang, meaning it has 2 rows of 3 lugs (six lugs total). Treat one row as row A and the other as Row B and wire up just as the layout says. Good Luck

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  9. Built this up a while ago, and I noticed that I'm having some trouble with background wine when the pedal is engaged. Any ideas on where I should look?

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    1. 99.99% most likely an issue with the 7660 and the charge pump circuit. Incredibly fucking temperamental circuits when it comes to noise! Make sure you have good quality ICs. I have had eternal issues with 18V charge pumps and voltage inverter circuits.

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    2. Plugged it in tonight and tried swapping the 7660 out for 1044 with no luck, still have the wine when the pedal is plugged in, engaged or bypassed. Not quite sure what to do at this point...

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    3. Yeah I've had that issue heaps of times and sometimes it's hard to know what the actual issue is. Stupid noise. What is the exact model number of the chip you're using?

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    4. I had this problem to so I changed the charge pump for this one http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.ca/2013/02/ne555-voltage-inverter.html.

      Just remove the 7660 from the board and the two capacitors and put the new charge pump aside in the box. Worked fine with no noise. Great pedal to use with another overdrive/distortion!!

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