July 2011 Pedal Gallery

My neighbour told me that I've been neglecting the blog of late, so I've just taken a few happy snaps of the pedals that I keep under my desk. This is most of my current working collection. I've built loads more than I have here at the moment and have discovered Circuit Snippets to be a great collection of unusual circuits for processing audio. Whoever the guy is behind it, must be some kind of genius!

Not much has been going on, trying to get motivated to finish my pickup ring templates, and in turn finish modding my Les Paul.

Home made fuzz pedal - A blend of a failed Ampeg scrambler followed by two cascading Germanium Transistor boosters.

Fuzz face clone - Easy face with tone control - Substituted Soviet era transistors for recommended.

Psychtar - From circuit snippets.

DOD stereo chorus - With vibrato mod (my design).

Bronx Cheer - Another pedal from Circuit Snippets

Ibanez  DE7 - Cheap good sounding delay.

Zoom H4n - Not a pedal, but has loads of FX. Good as a Rocktron substitute.

Danelectro Cool Cat Chorus - 18v model. Yard sale bargain.

MXR Blue Box - Two octaves down with lots of fuzz - Great square wave tones.

Fuzz Face Clone - Another fuzz face clone - Soviet GT404 Germanium Transistors. Volume control only.

Belcat Tremolo - Nice cheap variable wave shape tremolo.

Boss SD-1 - Modded clipping stage - Can't remember which mod...

Digitech Bad Monkey - One has been modded to let more bass through - Can't remember the cap value, probably .1uf

Sovtek Big Muff Pie - Indie rock staple. Fuzz Fuzz Fuzz. Works best with low output pickups.

Sovtek Small Stone Phaser - Nice sounding phaser, but has a tendency to generate nasty clipping on the front end if modded to compensate for the volume drop.

Fulltone DejaVibe - Nice Univibe clone. A bit expensive, but worth checking out.

Jim Dunlop Octavio - Fuzz Octave - Unpredictable insane fuzz. Very pronounced octave effect. Sounds different on every guitar.

Legacy OC-100 - Boss OC-2 clone - Might be cheap, but it tracks as well as any pedal. Works great with my stereo flying v!

2010 - Boss SD-1

This one came to me nice n' cheap. I bought it at a 2nd hand dealer in the city. $65 and practically brand new.
What do you do with cheap pedals? Mod them of course!

I'd read that this is basically a tube screamer with some parts changes.

Stock this pedal is pretty decent sounding, a moderate overdrive on full and a nice clean boost on minimum.
Unfortunately the filter caps on the input remove a lot of bottom end. So rather than add some punch, it cuts some of the guts out of it.

The first thing I did was to do the SD808 mod and turn it into a tube screamer.
Basically it's just changing one cap, removing another as well as a diode in the clipping stage.
What this does is make the clipping asymmetrical and alter the tone control.
To my ears and playing style, it wasn't much of an improvement. It still lacked the bottom end.

The next mod I did was the bass mod.
This is done by simply bridging two components, a capacitor and a resistor.
It was three weeks before I got around to testing it out, but when I did, the pedal was a whole new beast.
The gain still isn't much really, but that's OK I like it like that. The bottom end is nice and big, though a little muddy as there's a slight octave effect on some notes. But for the tone I'm after, this is almost perfect.

Placed in the FX loop of the Delta Blues, the pedal is responsive to dynamics and has the added bonus of acting as a master volume, though the extra gain from the preamp means that the pedal never completely cleans up.

I may end up doing some further mods to the clipping section and maybe change out the opamp for something else. But for now I'm pretty happy with this cheap pedal that cost about $1 and 15 minutes of my time to get close to what I want out of an overdrive.

Not too smooth, and just a little raspy.