Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
Here’s the ColorSound Wah-Wah. I hadn’t laid out a wah before, probably because I haven’t built one myself before, and I don’t use one much when I play. Anyway, the ColorSound Wah-Wah is pretty simple and sounds very good. What makes it unique is that it doesn’t use an inductor like most wah circuits. This … Read more
The fOXX Tone Machine is a classic fuzz box and a very versatile octave effect as well. Pretty standard controls, and the toggle switch controls the octave effect. I’ve laid this out for onboard pots and octave switch, and added polarity protection and power filtering. 2N3904s or 2N2222s can also be used in place of … Read more
The DOD 280 was DOD’s first compression pedal made in the late ’70s through the ’80s. A great sounding compressor, this fairly simple circuit uses an LDR and LED combination (in the form of a VTL5C2) to compress the signal. This one’s laid out for on board right angle PCB pots, mounted from the solder … Read more
Haven’t done a Big Muff layout in a while. This is the Triangle version again and is pretty much the same layout as before, but I changed the orientation of the Tone pot. I was going to build this myself and realized that I didn’t like how far down the Tone pot was from the … Read more
A while back Brian Wampler shared a bunch of mods to the classic MXR Distortion Plus circuit in Premiere Guitar magazine. It adds a tone control, a switchable soft clipping stage, a compression switch, and a bass boost switch.
The EHX Germanium OD offers 60s overdrive tones using a combination of germanium and silicon transistors (all PNP). All 3 pots control the voltage is some way. The Bias pot controls the amount of voltage that reaches the Gain control, which in turn controls the remaining voltage that gets to the germanium transistor. The Volts … Read more
The Fender Blender would probably just be a blip in the history of fuzz if it weren’t for the likes of Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) and Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), as it was generally regarded as too harsh sounding. This aggressive fuzz is good for metal leads and also can create an octavia sound … Read more
The Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster offers 25 dB of clean boost with flat EQ (and it’s also a line driver). It uses a combination of two NPN and one PNP transistor. Originals use BC107s and BC177s, but other transistors should work fine as well. Check out the demo video below for more info.
This is a pretty unique fuzz from the mid-70s by Univox. It was designed by Shin-Ei and like a few other Shin-Ei designs it can suffer from volume loss. To get it back up to unity or above, DIYSB forum member LucifersTrip made some mods to the circuit that keep the original sound, but improve … Read more
Here’s a compressor design from MicTester. Here’s what he had to say about it over on FSB: Do you remember the old-fashioned way of doing bass compression? It used an LDR across the volume control illuminated by an incandescent lamp across the speaker terminals! It was a simple method back in the 60s….This compressor is almost that … Read more