So, the development was Earth was kind of strange.
I had just finalized the circuit when people started actually buying Fire Fuzz, and I my first rush of sales was a bit overwhelming. It was hard to spread my attention between that and a new effect.
I hadn’t really planned on doing much marketing or anything until I finished the entire Elements series, and the sudden rush of sales called for a bit of a change of plans.
In the midst of this, the prototype PCB’s sounded good, but were a bit awkward to build, so I re-did the PCB for the first run.
They didn’t sound the same, though! The prototype had more gain, but the ones that came were more of what I was aiming to do, which was make a fairly low-gain overdrive using a mellowed-out fuzz circuit.
Because they sounded cool and fit with what I wanted, I figured there had actually been some mistake in my prototype layout, and went ahead and released Earth v1.
After a few of these, I began to notice that the enclosures I was getting just didn’t polish well. So I decided I’d change to higher quality enclosures, a smaller form-factor, and an even easier to build PCB.
These new PCBs sounded like the prototypes! This was still a pretty crazy time for me, and I had been talking with Guitar Center about selling them a few pedals. I didn’t want to push that back any further, as I wanted them to be able to include Earth in their holiday marketing.
So I didn’t really dig into what happened with those v1 Earths.
Flash forward a few years, and I had the time to take a look. What happened was still extremely confusing.
It seems like the footprint for the transistor I used was backwards. Everything looked right, but when I really examined it, it seemed like the parts that were supposed to be connected to the emitter were connected to the collector, and visa versa.
It seemed like a happy accident that it worked at all. But then I tried to put it on the breadboard to see if I could do some mods to the handful of them I had left.
I couldn’t get it to work on the breadboard, though. Flipping the transistor around just made it not function. Having it in “right” made the v2. I dug around for the PCB layout on my computer, and confirmed I had overwritten it. Some other spooky jazz was afoot, and I conceded that there must be more to it than dreamt of in my philosophy.
I had a few of those PCBs left, and wanted to do something different with them. I also still was interested in modding the v1s I had left, and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to cascade a few of them in one effect. Earth ++ is the result.
I only had the parts to make five of these, one of which is my personal one. Because it seems some sort of black magic happened with those PCBs, and because I no longer have the files related to those, there appears to be no way to make any more of them.
So, I built them in the enclosures of the models I was modifying, threw on some paint to differentiate how they look, but was then left with a crucial point: adding a gain pot for each board seemed silly, and when I played it, it seemed like there was really only one sweet-spot with the gain.
So I decided to replace the gain control with a tone control, and that was that. I was really into simple tone controls at the time, and by just rolling off highs, it seemed to add a lot more versatility to the pedal.
