For its latest Pedal Drop, Drunk Beaver revives the cult 1990 Soviet PE-12 Elektronika Venta Overdrive as the Simferopol Venta OD

Based on an iconic slider controls Soviet ’Overdrive’ from 1990 - this is actually more of a fuzzy-drive - or even a proto-fuzz really. It has a really raw and gritty character as if the circuit is somehow infused with grains of sand!

Controls - Gain (Input Gain), Brightness (Resonant Filter : Mids+>), Cut (Low Pass Filter), Level (Output).

As usual, Vitalii has made some smart updates to the format, while maintaining the core character and vintage components. He has added input FET and output BJT buffers to improve the circuit’s pedalboard integrity and positioning, while using mostly original vintage parts - UD1208 Soviet op-amps, which are versions of UA776 essentially. 

Because of parts rarity / scarcity - only 60 UD1208’s were available, and each pedal needs 4, so 5 of the 20 made will contain another NOS cross-referenced IC chipset - B176 by TFK, which is also a version of the UA776. The Simferopol contains 4 sliders like the original - while they are oriented horizontally here because of enclosure constraints.

The original pedal had ’Taper’ as its first control - where Vitalli has swapped that for the more useful Gain control - which rather controls the input level versus the output amplification.

One of the most distinctive thing about this pedal is the EQ - where Brightness is actually a resonant filter going from Mids to somewhere up and above typical Guitar frequency range. The Cut is simply a Low Pass Filter.

In general this is a pretty raw and aggressive fuzzy-drive / fuzzstortion where the Overdrive label is somewhat misleading in that aspect as it’s far from any sort of conventional overdrive pedal. The unique EQ gives it a pretty wide range and broad palette of tones.

As an advocate of Fuzzy-Drives - I’m incredibly keen to get my hands on one of these!

20 will go on sale on the Drunk Beaver Reverb.com Store as soon as you see this post, they will be priced at $175.

Note that these are expected to be snapped up fairly rapidly - so you need to be quick!

As before, this is another rapid prototyping project where all the parts have only fairly recently arrived and the nature of this format has meant a little more work on the assembly side than usual so they are a little delayed from the usual last day of the month release schedule.

I’ve referenced a demo below of the original as a guide to how the pedal will sound, there will be no official demo.