Wednesday, September 7, 2011

D.I.Y guitar pedals - They actually work really well!


Wow! I went on a mission the other day and decided to make me some guitar pedals. It cant be that difficult. I was pleasantly surprised that is was a lot easier than I thought it would be. My first project was a simple "Muff" styled transistor based fuzz pedal. Built around two 2N5088 transistors for a nice high gain but vintage type of tone. What really blows me away is how it cleans up after the volume is dropped on your guitar. And riding the volume down to 4 or 5 gives you a nice clean boost with a slight touch of  hi-freq crunch. It sounds really nice. In fact I hate my DS-1 even more now.

Above is an image of the finished "Prototype". Its living in a pretty "South African Defense Force" or "unpainted Army" looking housing at the moment and would probably withstand a direct nuclear attack in that case. But it looks like shit. Oh, and I diddnt buy any knobs because the SADF use ones that don't fit on the pots I already had in my box. So it's kinda like a generic pedal / tank. I intend on ordering some Hammond 1590BB enclosures for it. Thing is, they come in boxes of 10 from my local electronic nerd. Will have the bux at the end of the month. If I don't spend it all on booze and loose women before then.


It was pretty straight forward to put this thing together. I did invest in some tools to make the job more professional. A Dremel (Dont know where I would be without it!) Some clippers, pliers, steel square, Muti-meter, gluegun some other bits and bobs. I already had a nice soldering iron so that was covered. 


As far as the way it sounds is concerned. Through my little Vox AC4 (class A) valve amp it sounds fantastic!!! Really nice fuzzy, high gain tone with loads of character. When you drop your guitars volume knob just a little it cleans the whole thing up and delivers a nice bluesy twang with what seems to be quite a bit of added highs. Could that have something to do with the fact that I diddnt install that treble bleed kit on my SG? Anyone know? I'm not complaining, I love the way it does that, just wondering what causes it to do that. Just not over driving the transistor as much? Is that it? Dunno! 

What I am running it through is a Epiphone G-400 SG with Wiring and pot upgrade and Golden Age Humbuckers into the Fuzz pedal into a Vox AC4TV. And in that configuration I get some of the nicest crunchy overdrive and blues breakup I've ever heard. I just plugged it into my DI input on my soundcard and ran it through a clean amp model on Amplitube 3 and it sounded pretty lame on the high frequencies. But that was to be expected. Thats why Im not posting audio samples right now. Will do that later when I get a chance to record the thing properly. Dont have any mics here at home. 


The image above is the finished and tinned PCB. Yes I even etched my own circuit boards. I really screwed it up though. I'm sure anyone who knows what they are looking at will laugh in glee to see how pathetic I am at making PCB's. Its my first attempt!!! Give me a break!!! The new ones I made the other day are far cleaner. And the traces don't look like a retard drew them. I was just so chuffed when it worked fine during testing. And continued to work when I plugged the guitar in. Its spotty because I didn't etch it long enough (Damn internet!) and because I live in a cave I didn't see the spots until I got it closer to the fire. This was obviously after I scrubbed all the print off. In the dark. With my matted cave man hair.    Oh well... It works fine and it is the "prototype" after all. 


Here we have the stuffed PCB waiting to be connected to a volume pot and some I/O's. Very simple circuit as you can see. Its amazing how much it does. I will be moving onto more challenging projects very soon. 

If you do want to know more about this amazing hobby, there loads of places you can look. I think Ill be a nice guy and post a huge link list on the best resources out there regarding pedals and building them. They are un-sorted. But hey! What do I look like? Your link slave? I'm not going to post the project files here because that would be uncool. And would be disrespectful to the hard working folk that make these projects and websites. Find them your self! Below! And really, most of these guys sell ready to solder kits with everything you need to make your own. And they are not all that expensive. So consider it. I live in a fishing village on the tip of Africa, this shit is hard to find mon! But I managed to get everything I needed from various shacks and street markets. Kidding! we actually have a thriving electronics industry down here. And quality components. Especially if you get them from a dude that works for the military. hehe! (That was bullshit by the way)






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1 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot for this post.Hi everybody,,,I'm a student & my hobby is playing guitar.Last week i've bought a guitar from https://musiquedepot.ca/

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