Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
I was recently commissioned by a couple of guys at my church to build some Strymon favorite switches. These are pretty easy to build and are a great place to start if you’re getting into building pedals. Not much to say about them other than that so let’s get into the build. Parts You will need … Read more
Today we’re going to be looking at the Friedman BE-OD, a distortion pedal that was designed to emulate the Friedman Brown Eye Amplifier. If you’re wondering how it sounds, just go check out the demo done by Pete Thorne here. While he makes everything he plays sound great, this pedal was really easy to dial … Read more
Let’s build the Madbean Turnabout (a.k.a. JHS Andy Timmons clone). I got the chance to play the JHS @ (Andy Timmons) at the Chicago Music Exchange a while back and it sounded pretty freaking good. It had a nice, thick overdrive/distortion and the clipping options made pretty drastic changes which was cool. So when a vero … Read more
Hey guys, I’m gonna be taking a look at the TC Electronic Hall of Fame 2. I was super excited when Amazon accidentally leaked this a while back. They were finally going to be adding shimmer and multiple TonePrint settings! I was already a fan of the original Hall of Fame, having used it for … Read more
In this post I want to talk about the order of a build. When I started I just put everything on one piece at a time and that made it hard to get things looking neat. Sometimes components fell out of the holes while soldering and made things down right ugly. It also took a … Read more
This post is an in depth look at the Ernie Ball VP tone suck mod. It works on all passive Ernie Ball volume pedals and can also be applied to other passive volume pedals. I’ll go over why people experience “tone suck” (hint: it’s because of impedance) and a step by step on how to … Read more
The jordan vico vibe interested me in early 2012 mainly because it’s so simple. As a rookie solder jockey that wanted to build every type of pedal to try them all the specs sounded very appealing. The tremolo circuit is about as complicated as a fuzz face (the pedal I built before that) and didn’t use any … Read more
For a while now, I wanted to build a nice, good sounding tremolo effect. I built the vico vibe in the past but it’s quite finicky to bias and has a volume drop when engaged, but compensating this with a simply SHO-style boost after it led to weird interactions. Once it’s biased it sounds great, … Read more
In 2009 the original Way Huge Aqua Puss mk1 was reversed on freestompboxes.org and revealed to be a slight variation of the Boss DM-2 with Panasonic MN3005 Delay Chip. There was a community project and a PCB made up and luckily I managed to get one of the last ones in 2012. It spent some time … Read more
This post is long overdue, since I already posted about building the Klon Buffer in 2012. This is around the time that I built my Klone as well, but I never made a post about it. Back then I was obsessed with reading about the Klon and how people would pay $1000 for the right … Read more