Paul's pedal-making page

Paul_C

Having spent stupid amounts of money on guitars, amps and pedals it's time to scale things back and get back into building my own again.

I have built pedals from kits and using stripboard and layouts from various sources, mostly simple (I like simple) and sometimes weird (I like weird).

So to start things off I thought I'd get things in order, photograph my old builds and then plan what to make next.

The list of builds includes:

Kits

Parasit Studio - Into The Unknown / Raygun Youth

Fuzzdog - Ampeg Scrambler

Stripboard

Devi Ever - Hyperion 2 / Electric Brown / OK

Tone God - Finish Line

LAL - Rattle Crow

(not sure) - Noise Ensemble

Parasit - Parallel Universe

4MS - Noise Swash

Shoe - Pixel

Fuzzhugger - Phantom Octave

Mid-Fi - Clari(not)

Self-created

Big Brother

HLA / HLA2 (Happy Little Accident)

Failures

Hummingbird - doesn't do what it should

Random Number Generator - doesn't really do much

Soundwave Breakdown (it blew up a transistor )

Paul_C

I've got some which have the boards completed but haven't been put into an enclosure (I was going to build a monster 8 fuzzes in one enclosure but ran out of enthusiasm when it came time to drill all the holes )

Those are:

Fuzzrocious - Ram The Manparts

Dwarfcraft - Great Destroyer

Mid-Fi - Demo Tape Fuzz

Rockett - WTF

Devi Ever - Disaster/Krackle Fuzz

Zvex - Fuzzolo

plus the Phantom Octave and Noise Ensemble already boxed.

So I might put those in their own boxes for now as a way of getting back up to speed.

I have plenty of things to plan (which is part of the fun for me), circuits to draw out, new ways of finishing enclosures etc. and sorting through all my pedal-making stuff to establish what I have here and what I might need to order for future projects.

Paul_C

These are all the ones built and (mostly) working.

Paul_C

First success of the new era.

The Tone God Finish line I built never really did much, so today I compared the stripboard layout to the original schematic from the Tone God himself.

Here they are:

The one thing I found which didn't appear to match was the polarised capacitor in the lower right of the layout, which (unless I've read it wrong) is the wrong way round.

I reversed it and the pedal now has a lot more of an effect

Paul_C

Pedal building / tweaking plans now include:

Four of the boards completed for the multi-fuzz build to be finished and housed in individual enclosures.

Twelve projects for 2024 decided upon.

One or two mods to existing builds planned, as much "to see what happens" as anything else.

During the process I'll be considering alternative finish ideas, possibly a tweak or two of existing designs, with an aim to homogenize my collection a little.

GoFish

You have two of my all time faves there (Pixel and Clari-not) and a few others that I'm interested in hearing about, so do keep posting updates please!

Paul_C

GoFish said:

You have two of my all time faves there (Pixel and Clari-not) and a few others that I'm interested in hearing about, so do keep posting updates please!

You'd probably like the Noise Ensemble then.

The next four are going to be:

Zvex Fuzzolo

Mid-Fi Demo Tape Fuzz

Dwarfcraft Great Destroyer

Rockett WTF

I'm going to boost the output of the LM386 in the Finish Line to see what that does to it (you just have to connect legs 1 & 8 with a 10uF capacitor and it goes from +26dB to +46dB which then pushes the transistors harder - if I add a switch then I can see what the difference is.

Next year I want to try the following:

Dwarfcraft - Robot Devil & Hax

Catalinbread - Karma Suture

Fairfield - Unpleasant Surprise

Zvex - Fuzz Factory

SS/BS - TAFM

Tim Escobedo - Too Many Knobs & Punch In The Face

Walrus - Contraband Fuzz

Mid-Fi - Random Number Generator (I've tried this once and it didn't work, but I've found another layout with mods to try)

Electro Faustus - Guitardammerung

Pladask Elektrisk - Odd Amplitude Modulator

Most are simple circuits, which I like as they're easier to troubleshoot.