Home made guitar pedals

Deep Blue clone internals.... simple stuff, it's basically a PT2399 delay chip and op amp. 

The electrolytic capacitors are all laid flat to save room in the case. There's a nice daughterboard for the 3PDT switch which makes internal wiring easy - not shown in the photo. Documentation is good, but not perfect. You can get pre-drilled enclosures if you like or drill and paint your own. Most of the kits are external power only but you can get some 9v battery ones.... depending on how full the case is. 

Once you've built one, the wiring becomes pretty self explanatory. The potentiometers are thankfully plastic backed, so you don't get any shorts on the solder side of the PCB. Well thought out kits. And nothing very much out of the ordinary: if you can use a soldering iron and follow a BOM and schematic, these are pretty simple to do. Component density is pretty high, so you have to be accurate and take care. 




Edited by Davesax1965 - August 29 2017 at 06:18

The kits cost about £30 - 45 each, the enclosures are about £10. So, compared to the £150+ some of these pedals cost, it sounds like a commercial venture *but* you couldn't charge commercial rates, probably only about £40 on top of the price of the kit for labour. 

This equates to "less than £10 an hour" and then you have picky guitarists saying "it doesn't quite sound like an original / don't like the LED colour / sky's wrong shade of blue today" so, basically, there is more money to be made elsewhere with a soldering iron for less headaches. 

Edited by Davesax1965 - August 29 2017 at 06:37

Oh yes. PS.

For about £40, the company above will make their kits for you. Takes about four days. Have a look at the link if you're interested. UK only, I think. 

http://shop.pedalparts.co.uk/

I did post more, but only the first pic seems to be displayed.

I have a few kits. A couple employ Tim Escobedo's schematics, the Bronx Cheer (Synth-sounding distortion filter thing) and the Jawari (a sitar-sounding thing). I can't remember for certain where. It was either from General Guitar Gadgets or from Moosapotamus, I think it was the former. I've also purchased the parts from various vendors for Escobedo's Pulse Width Modulator schematic.

I was originally intrigued by combinations of pitch-shifting and ring modulation. Later, I got interested in synth-sounding square waves produced usually by octave dividers. The MXR Blue Box does this straight out with its two octaves down setting. The Boss OC-2 also does this with both 1 and 2 octaves down when modded to bypass its filters. There are YouTube vids somewhere on the demoing it. It has a real Atari punk type of sound. I was fortunate enough to get someone to mod one for me. The octave dividers use comparators to create a very artificial sounding square wave (see Craig Anderton's Octave Divider and his Ultra-Fuzz). Modifications to the Roctave divider was the subject of alterations by someone a few years ago to create what they called a Synth Box. There was a fair amount of in-depth discussion on this and some sound files somewhere too, if they're still available.

Just recently (hasn't arrived yet) I ordered a guitar synth fully assembled from a do-it-yourselfer (http://www.parasitstudio.se) called Into the Unknown. He also has a synth called an Arcadiator and another he calls a 0415 Guitar Synth. These, especially the Arcadiator, have an Atari Punk sound, but they also get a unison sound and an octave up square wave along with the octave down, and it also provides pulse width modulation and a portamento effect. The designer uses CMOS circuits to digitize the circuits. I'm currently unclear as to whether comparators are classifiable as CMOS, but the results are much alike. Arcadiator kits were sold out, but I downloaded the schematic and build documents. I was able to get a kit of the 0415. I also ordered a kit for his Theremin Fuzz, which specializes in portamento, and a kit for his Sonic Reducer, which is a bit crusher type of thing.

I haven't started putting anything together yet. There are so many things to do. I plan on putting a work area together shortly, but I was away half the summer and now I'm catifying my house for two cats I just adopted. I look forward to doing some pedals, though. Thanks for the thread.



Edited by HackettFan - September 04 2017 at 18:52

I have a number of half built projects for ring modulators and octave dividers of various sorts - but as these tend to be the larger builds, they keep getting delayed by less time consuming pedals.

Home brewed modular synth: 18 months with a soldering iron. ;-)

Wish I was etching my own PCBs, I get them done by PCB Express in China. £4- 5 for a 100mm square board.... but a month to arrive ! ;-)

Excellent ! ;-)