Hi there.
Posting my first proper DIY pedal build!
It's a "blender" pedal, so that I can mix clean bass with overdriven sound. The overdrive sounded great but you couldn't really hear it it with the band as the bass end just dropped out with it engaged,
So, after reading threads on here, I thought blending some clean in might do the job. Unfortunately none of my music stores round here were very helpful apart from vague suggestions to "buy a mixer". Well I don't really want a mixer on my board for such a simple task.
Thankfully my brother-in-law is an electronics whiz, so he drew up a circuit for me, which I transferred to veroboard and put into a box, with his company's name.
Here's some pics:
The finished box, I went for a yellow theme as there's nothing yellow on my board so far (yellow LED too!):
On the board - connected to the "Overrated" overdrive pedal (it's an old Tokai pedal, similar to a Tube Screamer, I'm told:
The board, I used PCB mounted pots. The best decision? I don't know.. you do have to be sure you design your circuit right, so they work the right way - I didn't and had to make cuts and add jumper wires to get the output level knob to be clockwise = more volume:
The innards, prior to soldering and shrink-wrapping connector wires. One interesting thing here is the power supply input - the metal plugs have outer connectors to 0v or negative, whereas for guitar FX we want the opposite of that. I ended up making plastic washers and insulating tape to isolate the outers from the 0V enclosure. Very annoying!!! Also, I'd run out of connections on my daisy-chain adapter cable, so I added
2 power connectors so that I can daisy-chain from that if I make another power connector cable.
Not the neatest job I know, you learn a lot by doing it, I almost want to re-do it, but I think I'll not get too OCD and let it slide!
and a sound clip at:
http://MySpaceFileHosting.com/lmnbh/..._test.mp3.html
with varying amounts of overdrive blended with the clean.
The good thing about it is you can blend clean with whatever pedal you like. I'm now thinking of building a very fuzzy fuzz to use with it.
Comments welcome!
