Americana States Series: Anza Borrego

As the largest state park in the third largest state in the United States, Anza Borrego Desert State Park is one of the most breathtaking, wild, and harsh places around. Clocking in at over 600,000 acres, Anza Borrego is mostly untouched wilderness. The quiet of the desert can be comforting, but also misleading, as temperatures in the evening can quickly bring 40 degree temperature swings, and intense wind storms through slot canyons. Anza Borrego's claim to fame is its intense springtime wildflower superblooms, attracting visitors from all over the world. We wanted to capture this stark contrast on the the pedal, and think it came out great. Katie and I took our oldest daughter to primitive camp when she was 2 months old and it is one of our top 5 family memories. 

The circuit of Anza Borrego is based on our Gale's Germanium op-amp distortion circuit with some useful tweaks and mods. It's even more bass friendly than it was before, has two significantly different clipping voices, an expanded tone control, and carefully selected NOS components.  

• Switchcraft and Lumberg Jacks
• Gorva premium soft-touch mechanical switch
• Hybrid SMD and NOS through hole PCB
• NOS Germanium transistors
• NOS Ero, Vishay, Philips, CDE, Sprague, Dearborn and other premium quality audio-grade capacitors
• Dale Military spec metal film resistors 

Controls

First row of knobs (Northwestern most): Gain and Volume

• Gain controls both gain stages at the same time. It gets very distorted very quickly, but fine tuning the control on the lower side can result in dynamic and touch sensitive overdrive tones
• Volume controls the master volume of the entire circuit. It gets very loud.

Second row of knobs: Depth, Tone, Shape

• Depth controls the frequency being fed into the first gain-stage. CW is beefy, CCW is thin and treble-y. This setting will impact the character of the tone, shape, and clipping controls
• Tone controls the frequency of the effect, post distortion. CCW is thin and treble-y, CW is bassy and muffled
• Shape controls the clipping high-shelf (most apparent at low gain settings)

Toggle Switch: Clipping options (differences become more apparent as the gain is higher)

• Stock, asymmetric Germanium diodes--compressed, quite clipped
• New, symmetric LEDs--much less compression, less hard clipping

Power

It is critical that you use a high quality, isolated and filtered power supplies with The Americana States Series. Every modern measure was taken to ensure quiet, recording-worthy noise suppression, but low-quality power and power supplies can inject unwanted noise in these effects. Even though we've designed them to play nicely on a daisy chain, we don't recommend it. 

• NOS Germanium Diodes 
• Hand-wired and assembled in California
• Custom wooden box with laser-etched graphics (one tree planted with each sold!)
• Custom art print and instruction card