This post offers you a free download of our general PCB Assembly Guide. It covers basic components such as resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc. It also offers tips on lining up and orienting parts as well as step by step suggestions on which parts you should place first, second, third, and so on.
The Queen Bee is packed full of features that make audio FX design success a much simpler task. This post will not cover all of those features. Instead, it will cover a real-life scenario in which the Queen Bee shines at bringing success to your audio FX project.
The Queen Bee is designed to ease the process of separating the stages of your effects onto different breadboards, vero boards, or whatever other design method you use. This allows you to concentrate on success and building in stages rather than large chunks. It also enables you to use designs from one project in later projects and easily rearrange stages until you get your desired sound.
Let’s say you’re wanting to play around with a PT2399 delay module.
First you plan a transistor buffer you’d like at 9v. You can connect that breadboard to Header A.
Then you want to experiment with a PT2399 delay IC. That requires a 5v line. Header B
You’d like to feed that into an opamp amplification stage with +12v and -12v rails. Expansion Header C.*
All of those voltage selections are easily available to you at once. All of the audio connections are automatically passed from section to section with no routing needed.
If you happen to turn on the power and get silence you can mute/solo each stage of your design to determine exactly which section is giving you problems. Once you have determined which section is faulty you can use the supplied audio test connection to probe your circuit and determine exactly where you’re losing your signal.
Let’s say you find that the final opamp stage has sound on the input side but not the output. You double-check and find you accidentally grounded the output. Change a wire and viola! Now you have a working PT2399 with a buffer and amplifier to experiment with.
But that’s not it! Let’s keep going.
How would it effect your sound if you used a transistor amplifier instead of the opamp amplifier at the end?
It’s easy to see. Just unplug the opamp amplifier stage and plug in a transistor amplifier stage. Don’t take apart that opamp circuit. It works. You can use it again later without rebuilding it. And it’s simple to connect circuits to the Queen Bee.
That is only one example of what you can easily achieve with the Queen Bee.
And don’t worry if you don’t think three stages is enough for you. Adding an expansion is easy. Our Swarmer board adds an additional eight stages. Guess what? You can plug in another Swarmer and add another eight stages. Is eighteen stages enough for you!? If not, another Swarmer. This is getting out of hand!! But it’s your design. You do you! We don’t judge.
Expansion Header C does not have all of the same features as a normal FX Stage. It is primarily intended to add an expansion module to your setup. It can be used as an FX stage, but lacks impedance adjustment, bypass switches, and the audio FX stage signal loop.
