Guitar Pedals

27 May 2021

Making my guitaring sound even choppier (intentionally this time)

I've begun my foray into electrical tinkering and guitar pedal building by trying to make some fuzz pedals. One finally works! The housing is a box my friend Mischa 3D printed for testing encoders on the synth I'm building. The work I'm doing wouldn't be possible without his help (and his tools, at some points in history) so, as always, thanks Misch for being a real one.

This is what it looks like on the back

and here's a crude draw up of what things did during the breadboard phase.

Along the way, I tried some very simple (yet unsuccessful) pedals

and some very difficult (also unsuccessful) pedals

to the point where I had to debug a regular ol extend-o true bypass pedal

which took longer than I care to admit! (because a quote unquote bypass pedal is literally just two mono jacks soldered together; signal to signal, ground to ground. it should be one of the easiest things to debug in this type of project but so it goes)

There were some middle points of success, however, first getting the LED to light up and then getting the true bypass to work through the 3PDT footswitch correctly

Trying to build pedals has been fun, and it's been great learning experience going into synth and other instrument/electronics work. I've gotten a lot better at soldering and a tiny bit better at debugging hardware, both of which I'm fairly proud of! I'm hoping to get to a tremolo/vibrato sort of pedal or module soon, let's see if I figure out a way to do that in the nearish future