I guess I’ve been bitten by the pedal-mod-bug. I’m not sure how I feel about turning into one of THOSE guitar dudes –the ones that are always tinkering and coveting gear. That’s life though, you watch yourself slowly turn into the people you used to make fun of.
Anyway after working on my old phase 90, I wanted to try more projects. When I worked at RadioShack back in 2011, I was able to breadboard a distortion pedal. It had been a while since I studied schematics, so i wanted to start small.
I’m not sure where I stumbled upon this diagram, but it looked simple enough for me!
The only thing was that I had never heard of a voltage starver. So I looked up what they did and how they sounded, and I dug it. I ordered all the parts off eBay and waited for them to show up. While I looked up other voltage starver pedals I found this blog talking about putting a voltmeter on the pedal. http://theukuleleblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/how-to-build-dying-battery-simulator.html
So I found a digital voltmeter on eBay and tested it out…
I didn’t have a drill so I used my soldering iron to melt the mounting holes in the plastic case. That’s why it looks so sketchy.
I plugged the starver into my VOX distortion booster and loved it. The sweet spot is just under 5 volts with all the knobs slammed. You get this crazy fuzz. There are only two issues with putting this pedal on my board now. The “ON” led doesn’t light up when the voltage is dropped down and the pedal is noisy even when it’s off. So I’m going to be building a true bypass looper.