Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
Last post of 2014. Happy New Year, everybody! Here’s the early 80s DOD FX55 Distortion, without the original switching circuit so you can wire it for true bypass. The original used a TL062 dual op-amp, but the 2nd half of it wasn’t in the signal path all, so I went with the single TL061. The … Read more
Haven’t done a layout with board mounted pots in a while, so here’s the Lovepedal Black Magic. It’s a LM386 based distortion that tries to get achieve the “Brown Sound.” I added polarity protection and put the LED resistor on the board as well.
Here’s Run of Groove’s take on the DIY classic EA Tremolo. I’ve laid it out so that the rate indicator LED can also be used as the on/off indicator. Here’s how you’d wire the LED to a 3PDT switch as the on/off indicator.
I’ve seen a lot of different PCB layouts online for this effect, but all of them had at least one jumper on the board. Jumpers aren’t the end of the world, but I know for me, if I’m going to go to all the trouble of etching a PCB, I don’t want to mess with … Read more
The Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer compressor has become a staple among the DIY community. Original units plugged straight into the guitar, with no external controls except for an on/off switch. This layout has the level control offboard, but the bias is a 10k trimpot, but could easily be wired offboard as well. And you should … Read more
Here’s Wampler’s Plexi-Drive, another Marshall-in-a-box pedal. The original unit uses a 470µ capacitor for power filtering, which seems like overkill to me. I’ve replaced that with a 100µ cap that should do the job just fine. Some build reports on FSB say that the 15k resistors from 9V to the drains of the J201s might … Read more
One of the many Plexi-in-a-pedal options out there, the Marvel Drive has parallel input stages allowing you to create your own blend between the normal “channel” and the treble “channel.” Gearmandude can show you better than I can try to explain it:
This is a variation of the Mictester Silicon Tonebender, which is based of the Tone Bender Mk II Professional circuit. John Lyons was kind enough to shed some light on his version over at FSB.
Here’s a good sounding overdrive from Earthquaker Devices. This is for the first incarnation of the Crimson Drive with just level and gain controls. Uses a J201 in a buffer stage and a PNP AC128 in the gain stage. Dirk_Hendrik from FSB traced one and drew this schematic. The power filter section makes me scratch … Read more
FSB member Mictester came up with this design a couple years ago. Utilizes 4 transistors, 1 PNP and 3 NPN, though you could probably use an NPN in place of the PNP. Best to socket and try a few different transistors. The schematic says BC213L for Q1 and BC183L for Q2-4, but any medium gain … Read more