My other hobby - Effects pedals

[floydmoline]

now that my 2X12 is finished, i have gone back to my on going D.I.Y. hobby, i build effect pedals, mostly clones but i do have a few designs of my own.

i'd eventually like to break myself into doing it for selling, but currently it requires more capitol than i have, so only per order at the moment, only have one out there floating around that i let slip outta my hands, i made a proto-type strange master (range master) treble booster an actual germanium tranny guy, he wasn't constructed all that solidly since it was a proto-type and intended for my own use only, but i got a bad case of GAS on day and swapped it away, now i have no idea where he has gone.

this lastest round is a MXR script era distortion+ clone, and i went all clone with it so far :-P no part mods, and i even ripped off MXRs original art-work..... prolly get into trouble if i tried to sell it LOL OH WELL!!! and a solasound tonebender professional MKII

before i joined the board i already had the MXR on perfboard and was using it, but the tone bender is still in the bread-board stage, so i'll document the building process as much as possible, i am currently doing the finish work on the cases i generally do that first so i can see what kind of area i have inside for electronics.

[floydmoline]

first off the cases i typically use are deltron di-cast aluminum, which are not quite as deep as hammond or MXR cases, but lately i have found the room inside the boxes i got from small bear electronics sort of a luxury, i don't have to worry about space, the deltron boxes are a bit on the cramped side, but don't cost near as much as the hammond boxes, so until supplies run dry i'll be using the small bear cases which are MXR sized, i think they are slightly deeper than hammond 1590Bs.

[floydmoline]

i sand the boxes smooth starting with 150 grit paper to remove any seams left over from casting, then work my way down to (or up to depending on how you want to look at it) 440 grit, once you get to 440 grit they are nice and smoothand start to take on a shine (partially polished) i wash them down with ronsonal zippo fluid, removes any grease, or oils the metal happend to pick up from my fingers if i forgot to wash them :jumpgrin: then i lay on a really thin layer of chevy orange paint just enough to mist coat the whole box, i do this because orange seems to be cheaper than primer grey lol, i do this on all the boxes regardless of color, it helps make sure i get a uniform coating, orange shows where i missed and through the next layer of paint, i let that sit for about an hour next to the wood stove (it gets mighty warm over there helps cure the thin layer fast), then i put the first color coat on a fairly heavy coat almost to powder coated thickness, and throw the box in my handy toaster oven on 125 for 2 hours, bakes the paint hard (hopefully i don't typically abbuse my boxes so their durability is questionable in the hands of a gigin musician) after which you get something along the lines of this picture, which gets a second heavy coat, i don't bake this one, i haven't found a reason toit's just a coat to make sure the color is uniform

[floydmoline]

the bottom of that yellow guy had issues i had to sand out i put the 3rd coat on a little bit too soon and the paint started to lift........ the crackles that makes one clear coated look cool, but not what i was going for here lol...... next step i do is create and print of decals, i use waterslide decals and an ink jet, there are better ways of doing this but also significantly more expensive, such as screen printing, hand painted boxes are ok for Zvex, but not my bag..... the waterslide decals do tend to show the decal lines when an insufficient coat of clear is put on, but tht is something i can live with for now...... after printing the decals you have to spray a clear coat on them, i made this mistake the first time...... ink jet ink, will readily run even when dry when introduced to water so a coating of eurathane or krylon clear is needed and stops the run, but makes putting decals on a white box interesting should we say, since the clear coat ambers a bit and shows on white, there are ways around this but be prepared to be spraying clear on the finished box for a while lol

[floydmoline]

you can see the decal dis-coloration on this white box :-D

[floydmoline]

a few more coats of clear and the discoloration will fade sort of...... what actually happens is as the clear builds up in layers the decal lines disappear, and the discoloration (ambering) starts to show on the whole box so it blends in i dn't actually disappear, but i'm using poly eurathane not an actual clear coats, so that is probably the reason for the ambering. on darker colors you don't notice the ambering, but the decal lines show more, but nothing a few heavy coats of eurathane won't fix.

[floydmoline]

and last for today is electronics, the ont that is all wired etc is the MXR distortion+, and the one on the board is the tone bender tomorrow when i get finished clear coating the boxes i'll start working on putting the tone bender on perf-board

[floydmoline]

tonebender

[floydmoline]

once i have them bread boarded and know if they work and if it's something i want to waste solder on :-D it goes to the board design stage, i start with the schematic, and use a free program called "DIY layout creator", to position the components and see where my traces need to go once i have it all laid out, i prepare the components

[floydmoline]

in this picture you can see the germanium transistor :-D with teh shrink tubing on the legs, i do this to insulate them from other board components because i actually solder them on the board rather than using sockets, and in theory the longer leads will allow them to disapate heat faster, and hopefully make them more stable, since germanium transistors are very sensitive to temperature, even the temp of your finger touching them can change the tone...., i also solder the wires to the pots, and jacks etc at this time

[floydmoline]

then i dry fit everything together on the board, without soldering, to make sure i don't run out of room, once the stuff i soldered on it's quite a task to take it back off to reconfigure it.

[floydmoline]

all is soldered together, and this is what my "traces" look like, i like to follow old school methods, it's cheap, effective, might not look like a boss, but i garuntee it is just as rugged as a printed circuit board, plus side of point to point is it's not quite as noisy as a PCB is

[floydmoline]

you must forgive the messy wiring and fuzzy joints, this is after all a proto-type, not intended to be perfect, but what it all looks like in the box....

[floydmoline]

and the final touch one last layer of insulation before the sound test :-D once i plugged it in and started to play it, it deffinatly sounds fuzzy, like a good tonebender should, a few mods i would prolly make is a tone stack of some nature, since this thing sucks bass, but i haven't found a fuzz box that don't suck bass other than a big muff, the fuzz face, maestro fuzz, and fuzzrite all suck bass /shrug it sounds good to me, but we all have our own tastes, tomorrow maybe i can post a clip of it.

[Burnly]

What do you charge to build a pedal for someone else?

[torgeot]

looks very cool man. Have any sound clips of it?

[Monster]

wow very nice..... and i agree what do you charge.. i would love a monster pedal....lol...

[floydmoline]

i don't charge much over tha cost of materials, i don't see the point of charging 250 dollars for some thing that takes an hour of time and 20 dollars worth of parts to build... i don't have the capitol to build first and charge later, that's the whole reason i haven't tried to start building botique boxes, finishing boxes is where i have trouble lol and the only reason i'd charge more than 40 dollars lol finishing is a nightmare if you want it to look really nice

[floydmoline]

sound clips of the MXR distortion+ clone are up, i made 2 slight mods to it, so it don't clean up as well, but has more bass through it...... i put a 250K pot for gain instead of the 500k that was original, since i could really careless if it "cleans up" when the distortion is turned down heh and i changed the input and output caps to allow more bass in and out, so it has more gain availible than a stock one and more bass..... since i wanted a dirt box that was a true for life overdrive that didn't sound different when engaged, and had a bit more ompf than the what it had originally which was not much of a distortion so much as an overdrive. i sampled it in most configurations i could .... signal path goes epiphone les paul standard ---> MXR ---> peavey windsor (bass 2:00, mids 1:00, treble 5:00, resonace max, presence 3:00) clean ---> my new homemade 2X12 (which is currently a 2X10) ---> nady SP-1 dynamic mic ---> korg D888 digital recorder ---> USB cable ---> toshiba satellite pro notebook ---> sonar 4 producer edition ---> 96Kb/s MP3 and i know there are nasty artifacts from the MP3 compressor LAME codec don't do well with lower bit-rates..... no there is no EQing reverb, normalization, compression or anything just the straight up signal.

http://www.gear-monkey.com/music_all.php?user=3

[senor_penguin]

nice man, I would love to make pedals, but I'm still learning to do soldering ha

[floydmoline]

i've been doing electronic gizmos for a long long time, started with electronics in career center in high school, i liked to build new stuff rather than fix the broken stuff lol

[senor_penguin]

I hear you there man ha

[floydmoline]

still working on getting tonebender clips up lol, been a little bit busy last few days

[jackal]

well here a way to get your post to add up, lol... Sounds interesting man how long have you been building pedals? and what do you sell them for.. you know cause i have money to throw around, lol jk..
but really what do you charge?

[floydmoline]

i don't do it commercially like keely or those guys, like said i have no money to do it with being unemployeed currently, so as such if i built them for folks it'd have to be on a per pedal, per person basis, i'd only charge you guys on here materials and the price would vary from box to box, roughly it cost me about 25 dollars to build a silicon fuzzface, it was about 27 for the MXR guy, and the tonebender was a bit more due to the germanium transistors, that guy cost me 35, i built a MXR phase 45 clone a while back that ran me 35, and an "orange squeezer" compressor that was 27 but i was not all that impressed by it, i guess it did what guitar compressors do, just seemed useless to me lol, but like i said for the time being it'd be just the cost of materials (and shipping) i'd not charge labor, 2 reasons word of mouth advertising is worth more than a radio ad, and they'd be one off deals custom built, so if anyone wants something feel free to contact me, i'm working on a deal with someone on this board for a couple pedals i don't know if they want the cat let outta the bag on it as yet lol so i'll leave it at that, but once those are done folks on here will have something to go from as far as how well they are made and how they sound. biggest reason i haven't gotten into it commercially is building pedals at this time seems an awful lot like scrapping metal, everyone and their uncle joe is doing it, some are doing it stupidly and charging over 200 dollars for a custom deal (but that's not my style)

[jackal]

over 200 , lol there charging over 500 here, well there mostly from denmark, so there custom imports... anyway i'll message you and talk more..

[floydmoline]

ouch 500 bone way to much lol

[characterzero]

Cool work, I'm looking to start building effects soon, yet as of now I lack soldering talent. But I am planning on building a fuzz and a MOSFET booster. One thing is I don't have a breadbox to try stuff out on, but I'm building from schematics that are already tested and proven, so how important do you think having a breadbox for setup is?

I figure the simple fuzz should be a good first project. Any tips/tricks for the first time builder?

[floydmoline]

i use a breadboard just simply to see if it's something i am going to use and if it is a pedal worth of committing to a box, it's easier to tune a pedal on a breadboard than it is to tweek once it's soldered and in a box, and so far i have yet to find a pedal design that sounded good as is they all need to be tuned and tweeked to some degree, specifically fuzzes, fuzz pedals are very funky devices, they are the most variable devices you can make, take very few parts yes, easy to put together yes, easy to get a good sound NO lol, seems everything effects a fuzz pedal, the ambient temperature, one cap sounds great the next one makes it sound like crap, even when both are theoretically identical, my recommended first build would always be a opamp clipper, MXR distortion +, or a DOD OD250 etc, any LM741 based pedal.

[characterzero]

Thanks for the advice, I guess originally I just assumed the fuzz wouldn't be too picky if it wasn't germanium based, but I guess not. Also just realized I showed my complete noobishness and incompetence by constantly referring to the "breadbox." But I guess I was close enough so you got what I meant.

[floydmoline]

yeah i knew what you meant i was new to it at one time myself :-D, Si fuzz pedals are just as fiddly as Ge boxes, the designs of fuzz pedals in general is the reason, in a fuzz you really aren't boosting the signal to clipping like in a amp or a diode clipper, a fuzz pedal you are saturating one of the transistors in the circuit that is kind of what gives fuzzes their unique sound.

long story short a fuzz pedal is picky regardless of whether it's Si or Ge, which is fine as long as you aren't picky about how it sounds :-D

[tidwop]

i need a heavy distortion pedal, how much you charge, iam being serious btw :rock:

[characterzero]

Just wondering where do you buy your parts? I was about to use pedalpartsplus.com because they have good looking prices, especially on true bypass switches, but they didn't have all of the transistor and capacitor values I needed. What about going to Radio Shack for some components? Does anyone know how their selection and prices are? I'm just thinking it might be helpful to have someone who knows what they're talking about there when I get parts in case I have questions.

[floydmoline]

radio shack is a hole in the earth...... their prices are out-rageous on parts.....

http://www.smallbearelec.com/StoreFront.bok
Http://www.mouser.com

[MrSandMan]

radio shack is a hole in the earth...... their prices are out-rageous on parts.....

http://www.smallbearelec.com/StoreFront.bok
Http://www.mouser.com


quoted for truth

[characterzero]

radio shack is a hole in the earth...... their prices are out-rageous on parts.....

http://www.smallbearelec.com/StoreFront.bok
Http://www.mouser.com


quoted for truth


Thanks for those links, I totally forgot about the SmallBear site because pedalpartsplus had $4.50 3pdt switches, where the smallbear ones are $10. Their other prices look reasonable though, so thanks :2thumbups:.

I sort of figured Radioshack would suck, but the optimist in me wanted to believe otherwise... oh well. Getting stuff in the mail is always exciting to me anyways.

[floydmoline]

radio shack is local, and they seriously do take advantage of that fact....

yeah the TPDT switches at small bear a bit steep, but an LED is a convenience, not required and IMO better left off unless youa re powering via AC since a distortion box alone draws minimal current and a battery will last forever in one, add an LED and it lasts all of about 72 hours :-P unleeess you really know how to tune an LED driver they EAT batteries quickly

[characterzero]

Ehh, I've got a 1Spot adapter with a daisy chain, so I don't need to worry about battery time too much. I mean if I was using batteries because of a gig, I'm sure I could get by with a mere 72 hours :winkx:. But yeah, I think I'll buy most of my stuff from smallbear now.

[floydmoline]

problem with all the parts places, some things are cheaper at one than the other, you'd think with all the same suppliers the prices would be similar /shrug

[characterzero]

Just bought parts for my first pedal! I found someone who substituted some parts from the original schematic and still got good results, so I was able to just use pedalpartsplus for everything. Now I just have to wait for them in the mail!

[floydmoline]

what ya building, and what was substitued? :-D always cool to see someone getting a start

[characterzero]

I'm doing this basic "Radioshack Fuzz" http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=65426.40 (it's down a little bit.

Basically I'm using the subs that "Cardboard Tube Samurai" mentioned a few posts after the schematic. Basically, after searching I became convinced 120K resistors don't exist. I got some extra parts/doubles so I can tweak stuff and also make something for a friend. Hopefully, I'll end up with something that sounds half decent, plus fuzz is a sound I'm completely missing from my arsenal.

Judging by this soundclip from one of the projects that was only using RadioShack parts, it could end up sounding really good.
http://www.filefreak.com/pfiles/49560/RS%20FUZZ.mp3

... ::: gears up to play some sabbathy riffs:::

All in all it's a fairly cheap project, and hopefully it'll pan out well. I'm doing it with help from a friend who knows a lot more about electronics so, that should help. :w:

[floydmoline]

yeah for the 120k anything close would work in the feedback loop, more than 110K but less than 200K, 120K is a fairly common value, i use them in place of 150K all the time, because i run out of 150Ks quickly lol..... an advisable mod i would reccomend is replace the 1M output with a 100K - 500K, 1M seems a little high to me, i'd leave the caps where they are..... good they are what i'd use, it'll be a little "wooly" (bassy / full range) with the caps in there, raise the input cap to lower the filters center frequency, i.e. to make it a bass fuzz..... to me a fuzz should be a bit on the bassy side, but i am a tone bender buff, i am not much of a fuzz face kinda guy, the only draw back i can see with that is you have to twiddle the volume on the guitar to vary the input gain.... prolly not a good thing, i'd stick a lower valued pot on the emitter of Q2, i.e. make R4 a 1k or 2K pot. and then get yourself a fancy red round case...... LOL

[characterzero]

Wow, that's for all the advice, it's really helpful especially since my friend who wants one of the fuzzes mainly plays bass.

And in reference to the cool case, I think the Roger Mayer fuzz cases are by far the coolest design.

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/1226010-lg.jpg

However, I'm starting with the typical boring gray rectangle... can't wait, though I'll probably take a while twiddling with the set up before I actually put it together.

[floydmoline]

yeah those octavia cases are pretty snazzy, i like boxes with non-standard designs, rectangles and and squares are so boring

[characterzero]

Alright, my first fuzz is finished!!! It sounds like :love: and is just as I imagined. The output is realllly high though, if I crank it past noon I'm apt to introduce some buzz, blow my amp, or pick up a radio station :w: . Do you think that was due to the 1M pot? If so, I figure in the future like a 500k would do the job well.

I'm loving this pedal right now. The insides are a bit of a mess, but for now it's working great. Maybe soon I'll record some sound clips or something. And by the way, Pedal Parts Plus is highly recommended. They sent everything in nice little individual labeled bags, and emailed me quickly about shipping stuff. Also the case I got ($5) is the EXACT same kind they use for the Electro Harmonix XO line (mine's the size of the nanos).

Woohoo!

[floydmoline]

yeah your 1M pot is going to have some effect on that if you would have put a 500K pot in there as i had suggested :-P you would have had about a 1/4 less travel for max output and about 25% less output, but it is primarily due to the collector going directly to the coupling cap, normally in fuzz face style fuzz pedals there are 2 resistors on the collector side of Q2 with the output being tapped between them e.g. moving the output to the other side of the 10K resistor, and adding a < 1K resistor between the coupling cap and the 9V supply. but congradulations :-D fuzz pedals are fun, out of curiiosity what was the exact model number on the case of the transistor you used, and post an MP3 :-P i wanna hear hehe

[characterzero]

I made a quick mp3 in my gear-space, nothing special. Please pardon the playing. Anyway, I think the fuzz sounds better in person. Also It works great with my delay for crazier stuff.

[characterzero]

Oh also the transistors are two 2N3904s, as seen here: http://www.pedalpartsplus.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PPP&Product_Code=4003&Category_Code=TRANSBP

[floydmoline]

not bad sounding, i would recommend usinf lower gain trasistors to get a more claassic sounding fuzz if you wanted, ala 2N2412 are my personal favorite fo Si transistors...... central semi-conductor's variety come in a metal case and are a little lower gain makes them sound smoother.

[characterzero]

Cool, I don't really know the difference between the different kinds of transistors, but I do recognize the metal cased ones being associated with a more vintage sound. Again, thanks so much for sharing your pedal knowledge.

[jeffreyliu838]

Wow, that's cool. That's an inspiration to stay in school.

I can read schematics and stuff, but they never carry everything you need for a pedal at radio shack. Germanium transistors for example. And I don't have enough knowledge to know what can replace what... So, where do you get all your stuff? I want a TS808, but they don't exist, hehe.