In my exploration of vintage effects, the DALLAS RANGEMASTER couldn't be skipped over. A standard stompbox that was used in the early days of the blues to get the right amount of treble overdrive for a sweet partial overdrive sound. They looked like this incredibly immaculate NOS one (more pictures of nos rangemaster in the box)



In those earlier days it was also aimed at pushing the treble end of the somewhat dull sounding guitar amplifiers and pickups.

All you need to know to make one for yourself is in this excellent pdf article by R.G. Keen of Geofex

Originally, the rangemaster was a device with germanium transistors which were mostly pnp. To overcome all the disadvantages I used the piggybacking silicon transistor technique to get a gain of 80hFE, which would be typical of a GE transistor.

Transitors being PNP, the boxes were positively grounded. This is no problem in modern days, except if you want to use the pedal in combination with modern guitar effects that are negatively grounded. We just swithched the polarized caps around and that's it.



Because of the small pcb and only one potentiometer, I mounted the pot on the pcb. I also added to minitoggles which control input and output cap values for standard, or less treble. Designwise I let myself be tempted to do another IKEA soup bowl

Well, here it is. Outside



And the inside: