"Ranni" Moon Chorus
Ever since beginning my journey in DIY Pedals and collecting guitar pedals, I was enamored by the amount of pedalboard pictures I'd seen that had a Walrus Audio Julia on them. There was something very alluring about the artwork that made it very desirable. It brought a dark aesthetic to the boards and made me think of pedalboards as not only tools of musical expression, but of artistic expression as well.
Since my board was lacking some modulation effects, this seemed the obvious first choice to add to mine.
Overall, the build went pretty smoothly and I was happy with how it turned out. Except I didn't yet have a means of getting artwork onto the enclosure. I needed to rectify that quick.
There's a ton of limited editions, but I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to build up some skills and create for myself something just as special. It was also an opportunity for my to try out my new Atomstack A5 Pro laser etcher.
The previous pedals I'd built were the Doom Machines which were etched by a local vendor using a CO2 laser, so I wasn't even sure if this would work. Fortunately, the 5W laser does manage to etch these matte sand black enclosures from Tayda.
A single pass etched the labels and two passes at 300mm/m at 90% power got the center artwork cleanly etched down to the aluminum. After etching a gentle wash with dish soap and a magic eraser cleaned away the remaining powder coat debris. In the future I'll have to exaggerate the finer details larger than 0.1mm because the overshoot of the laser made some finer details in the negative space disappear.
I have recently been enjoying the Elden Ring game and I tend to carry over my obsessions with popular culture to my builds, so I based this artwork off various fan art and vectorized it in a black & white style. "Ranni the witch" is otherwise called the Moon Princess, so the artwork incorporates the phases of the moon around the Blend knob. The functional aspects like the wave shape surround the toggle switch.
Since I had already been impatient (and had no laser etcher), I had already drilled and assembled the pedal. This made it extra difficult to get the artwork aligned to the large pre-drilled holes. The labels are about slightly off center (with some exceptions) and the center artwork was re-positioned in the second phase of etching.
It came out absolutely goregous, and it's probably one of my favorite builds so far.
The effect sounds really great too, but it doesn't get quite as slow as I would like. Unforuntaely, even the original Walrus Audio Julia it is based on has an audible pop when engaged. I also wish the bypass LED would get dimmer when bypassed. So perhaps I'll make a few mods to this to achieve that.
Enclosure: 125B Black Sand Matte from Tayda Electronics
Knobs: 12.5mm "The Magpie" Aluminum Andodized Teal Knob from Lovemyswitches.com
PCB: "Caesar Chorus" from PedalPCB
Footswitch: 3PDT Latching switch from Amazon