Soul Preacher Help!

[Gnome]

Hey!

I was pretty lucky, and got a used ehx Soul Preacher compressor for sbout 8 bucks at a local marked :shock: , anyway. I got the pedal and it works very well, and sounds good tot, but, it emtied a battery after about an hour of playing, which is a pretty short period of time. So I wonder if there is anything touching something it should not in there. Anyone experienced the same problem?

[Mark Hammer]

The Soul Preacher is basically an Orange Squeezer with a few improvements.  It has a bipolar transistor input stage, a gain stage used to drive a rectifier/envelope-follower circuit, and an FET used to attenuate what goes between the input stage and gain-stage.  (Indeed, many of the mods I suggested for the OS are actually incorporated into the Soul Preacher).

I'm not sure why, but the Soul Preacher has a considerably more complex circuit for deriving a Vref than most other pedals.  Apart from that, I'm not sure that there is anything in the circuit that would necessarily draw a great deal of current.  So, my guess is that you maybe do have a short somewhere.  The dual op-amp that's in there doesn't appear to have any special requirements so if you happen to have one handy with lower current requirements, feel free to use it.

People complain about the noise of the SP, but they tend to complain about the OS much less.  Given that the two are so close in functioning and design, maybe it is worth a collective pondering to see what there is that could be improved in the SP to address whatever complaints have been raised.  At the very least,, what does one use to replace the 1N3666 diodes, and what are the transistors used?