Custom Centaur pedal for Wayne Sermon of Imagine Dragons

It’s a long story as to how I got hooked up with Imagine Dragons, but last year I got the opportunity to build a custom Centaur clone for their guitarist, Wayne Sermon. He was putting together a new live rig from the ground up and wanted to include a Centaur, but didn’t want to give up the pedalboard real estate for his original unit. I designed a PCB that would fit into a 1590B-sized enclosure and then built the pedal with an almost antique-looking distressed finish. Here’s how it turned out:

And here’s the inside:

After I built the first one, he tested it against his real Centaur. He couldn’t hear any difference between them, and this one is about 1/3 the size, so the real Centaur got the boot. He then asked for another one for his secondary rig. So he actually has two of these now.

I later used this PCB design as the basis for my Refractor PCB project. If you want to build one, you can buy the PCBs right here on the site.