Intro to DIY Pedal Building
This is the first post in a series on building guitar effects pedals. It’s going to be a bit out of order- I’ll be starting with what is usually considered the finishing touches- putting the pedal in an enclosure, modeling and laying out an enclosure in Google/Trimble Sketchup, drilling the enclosure, painting and finishing it.
Then hopefully later, I’ll go back and do a project showing how to build a simple boost pedal from scratch.
This first video is the motivational intro: here are some of the things I’ve done, and yes, you can too! If you have some interest in electronics and guitars, what better way to improve your knowledge? You can get started with little or no electronics experience, and you’ll learn a bunch along the way.
In part 2, I give a full beginner’s course in Google Sketchup.
Here are some useful links for pedal building:
Pre-printed circuit boards, plans and kits, circuit diagrams:
- Guitar PCB – boards and some parts
- Build Your Own Clone – kits, boards and parts
- General Guitar Gadgets – kits, boards and parts
- Tonepad – great source for circuit diagrams, and boards
Useful circuit diagrams, background info, forums, etc:
- AMZ – excellent resource from Jack Orman, one of the pioneers of DIY pedal building
- DIY Stompboxes – Great forums and blog
- Fuzz Central – fuzz, wah, compressors, tremolos. Lots of good info.
- GEOFex – los of useful resources
- gaussmarkov: diy fx – some excellent intro resources for pedal circuits
- Beavis Audio – more good guitar effects projects and resources.
Parts resources (enclosures, jacks, switches, pots, knobs, transistors, caps, resistors, etc):
- Pedal Parts Plus- pretty much everything you’ll need
- Mammoth Electronics- similar to pedal parts plus
- Tayda Electronics – insanely cheap overseas parts resource
- Mouser – huge electronics warehouse
- Digikey – huge electronics warehouse
As mentioned in the video:
- Fulltone OCD – excellent overdrive pedal
- ProCo RAT – Mods from Ruetz and Beavis Audio
- RadioShack Electronics Learning Lab – great for prototyping circuits
Tagged with: Electronics • Pedal • Video
Burst
Good stuff John, thanks.
rk
Awesome idea for a video series!
Mr.John,can i jus solder everything wire to wire without circuit board????
You could but I’d never really suggest it. It’s much easier and tidier to use a circuit board.
but to get the exact circuit board,i hav not idea how to…….
You have a few options. First is to just wire it up point to point, but this quickly becomes unwieldy with anything but the most basic circuits. Or you can use perf-board or vero/strip-board. Or you can buy a pre-designed circuit board from an online source (see my blog for links). Or you can pay someone to etch your circuit, if you provide them with a design (e.g. ExpressPCB). Or you can etch your own PCB (but this is the most advanced, and requires special materials and chemicals).
good stuff bud, I always wanted to get into pedal building but there’s a surprising lack of info available on youtube.
Great stuff!
I like every vid you make john. You have a soft, and enjoyable demeaner that i can follow and listen to. Keep ‘em comin’!
That is totally awesome how you do all your videos on the floor. I have never been able to do make my legs do that. Do you do all your computer work on the floor too?
Funny – I don’t have a really good space to do these videos, so I always end up on the floor
For work, I have a sit/stand geekdesk, and spend much of my time standing.
Good job John! Very informative!
Do you know what is R=V/I ?
No?
google for : theelectronicsbook and learn the electric circuits hobby.
Good for beginners