sfxguitareffects

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

A friend of mine who is a musician from NZ asked me to build him a Crowther Hotcake because it would be difficult to get one in Europe. I researched the cicuit and it turns out there are different versions of the Hotcake, which Paul Crowther has been building since the 70ies. Apparently the versions … Read more

About a year ago I decided to take this guitar pedal thing to another level, so I learned eagle, founded a company and started making my effects look a bit more professional. That was at the same time I discovered Oshpark and realised how easy it would be to design a PCB and get it … Read more

I have recently – a year ago – rediscovered my interest in building pedals and decided to make this pedal building thing a side-business. I have started a website called suchahardman guitar effects. My Instagram account also shows a few things I’ve been working on since. As this blog amazingly is still generating views even though … Read more

I had modded my deep blue delay clone for a volume control because I heard about volume drop issues, though I have none of them, but I really like the clean boost it gives me. Unfortunately I barely use the boost because I don’t want the volume jump when turning on the DBD. So I … Read more

After having been quite frustrated with my Tubescreamer-like SRV Special that was one of my first builds ever, i decided to give the old TS circuit another try. This time I chose the Lovepedal Eternity (which is a tweaked TS circuit) for several reasons. The first reason was a discussion on FSB regarding opamps in … Read more

A week ago or so, I finished building a Honeybee clone. I went with the madbean pcb (discontinued) and bearfoot version of the circuit. The enclosure is a brush-painted Eddystone in gold/apricot with a adhesive decal and clearcoat on top. Here is a photo after the box was clearcoated. The decal was made full size including the knob, led, and … Read more