Stasis Leak

As my system has grown and the number of possible voices has increased, of course I have found myself needing more and more effects. I use a lot of reverb and delay (who doesn’t?) and I like to treat each voice separately, so I found myself needing another unit.

As soon as Rick at Frequency Central announced the Stasis Leak, I knew I had to build one.

It’s a DSP multi-fx unit, with a huge stereo reverb, chorus and a clockable/tap delay. It uses a Belton ABE-FX submodule to provide the DSP functionality and the PCBs are very high quality and all through hole.

It was a pretty quick and easy build. Nothing tricky really. I took my time and had it done in a couple of hours.

I slotted it all together and gave it a test. Initially, there was a problem. I’m not sure why, but the back of the header pins for the DSP submodule were just touching the solder joints for the voltage regulator, which was causing a short and making a very unpleasant noise. I think there’s just very little wiggle room and maybe if I’d pushed all the pin headers between the boards over a bit while soldering them, it might have been OK.

I decided to just remove the header that the DSP submodule sits in and solder it directly to the board instead, which solved the problem.

It sounds fantastic. The reverb sounds way better than I thought it would; really, really nice. The delay is great as well and clocking it, the time can be subdivided/dotted so will be really useful for performance. I haven’t really played with the chorus much yet, but it sounds good enough!