Pedal Build: Big Muff Pi – Clone/Salvage

So I’ve had a Reissued Big Muff pedal for a while now. I seldom used it. I got tired of the tone of it and I never liked how much space it took up on my pedal board. So I thought i could salvage the parts from it and throw it into a smaller case. I bought the pcb from General Guitar Gadgets and I used their new schematic/version of resistors and capacitors.

I was able to transfer all of the  Diodes and Transistors. Then I used about half of the original resistors. As for the capacitors and the rest of the resistors I ordered from MammothElectronics.com.

It works! but it still needs knobs.

Pedal Build: True Bypass Looper

After throwing the Distortion Booster with the Voltage Starver on my pedal board, I immediately needed this pedal. I wanted to get rid of the noise and make it so that i can see when it’s on with an indicator light. I found this simple diagram through Google.

true

I ordered most of the parts on eBay, and picked up the knob and jacks from Torrance Electronics.

I also bought an electric drill today, so now I’m all set to build more pedals from scratch. I quickly learned that i should have marked where i wanted the holes, because now it looks sloppy from freehanding it. I’m just stoked it works.

 

Built My First Pedal? The Voltage Starver

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!

voltage

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.

Weird Cover #1

I’m going to start doing weird covers of songs. Just quick and dirty takes, when I’m not tracking real stuff. I’ll be posting them to my bandcamp. You can download/stream this one now.

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