Addicted to pedal building?

[juansolo]

Valve-o-tron - Valve Boost/Distortion/Preamp



Yet another built for Marauder the only difference this time being LED clipping.


Vibratron - Valve-o-tron & Vibracaster



Taking the valve based pedal thing a little further... This came about from running a Valve-o-tron into a Valvecaster and it sounding really very good. As we know the valve caster responds well to boost on the front of it, it seemed only right for that boost to come from a valve also. That I knew would work, so to make it more interesting instead of a straight Valvecaster, it's the Vibracaster tremolo instead.

Currently entered into a competiton *fingers crossed*


Agent Orange - Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer Clone



A compressor. Mine is built with the left over Burr Brown opamp from the OD2 and Marauder's with a TI (his is the one with the big knob). This has also been used to trial some new decals rather than waterslides. The diode is backwards in the gut-shot of mine, this has been corrected since the picture was taken. We've got some uber-sensitive trim pots on the way as these are a right bar-steward to bias.

I also got around to laying down the schematic for the Valve-o-tron for whomever asked for it:



I've currently got another 4 planned.

But I can stop any time...

[horsehead]

that's what they all say.....

[mikey5]

Another built for Marauder who is not so keen on the more outlandish designs I like, and prefers ones that 'aren't as fussy'. Fair enough, I'll be making up for this shortly if mine works when I finish it shortly... Anyhow, back to this one. It's a Shredmaster built on the BYOC board with enormous caps as that's all we had lying around. Nothing too radical here, the Bright switch swaps a cap to brighten it up a bit on demand as mine can be a bit dark on humbuckers but is brill on single coils (I'll be adding this to mine also). The Crunch mode switch just flips between sync and async clipping.

Piccies (the sockets are ancient, hence the splurgage and the decal stretched when I stuck it on, bar-steward thing!).

Click for a larger one:

Dang who built that? That looks great

[sgmypod]

apart from the big scary resistor...removed a load of them from an amp

[juansolo]

The big scary resistor did indeed come out of an old amp IIRC. It just happened to be the only one I had handy at the time that was the right rating.

[juansolo]

Woohoo, The Vibratron came 2nd!

[mikey5]

Any DIY books I should study for this stuff? I have zero experience with pedal building or much with electronics i only have recently gotten the burning desire to learn all that I can about everything to do with music engineering. I am getting some great tools for guitar building and have lots of learning materials on that stuff but nothing for pedals

[juansolo]

Some of these are quite heavy going

My advice would be to get a couple of the easier all inclusive kits and do those. The more you do, the more sense it makes. It's all quite logical when you start to break it down as to where the signal is going. I just find it all kinda snaps into place as you do it rather than reading the theory.

[juansolo]

The latest creation:

Insonicbloom's 'The Gameboy Effect'







Quite possibly the coolest and at the same time, the most useless, guitar effect of all time. If you're a child of the 70's and grew up with Atari 2600s and Sinclair Spectrums, you'll know the delight of very primitive soundchip music. This magnificent creation will take you right back there. It uses the input signal from your guitar to trigger the effect, and the effect is epic.

Here is a link to the thread that started it all (with soundclip by ISB). Go on, you know you want to. In fact I may have to make another, as the LFO trim pot (SHINE knob on mine) would work brilliantly as an expression pedal... Now there's an idea!

[juansolo]

Some work in progress:



On the left is a DAM Sonic Titan that doesn't currently work. It's got the wrong transistor in it at the moment and a couple of caps are in parallel to make up for not currently having the right cap handy and it's really not very much of a Titan... The right bits should arrive tomorrow and if it's still not working it's time for some fault finding. On the right is a Super Hard On, which I made for shites and giggles (as there really is nothing to it and I had all the bits handy) and to test the millennium bypass which allows a led to be used with a DPDT stomp vs a stupidly expensive 3PDT stomp (about £1.50 vs £4). It all adds up :-) What shocked me is just how good the SHO sounds. To the point that I'm going to case that one up. Really surprisingly good for how little is in it.

[psy]

Just listened to the audio for the gameboy pedal.  It sounds amazing.  If my electronic skills stretched further than wiring pickups in I would totally build one.

[sgmypod]

*L*

[juansolo]

Just listened to the audio for the gameboy pedal.  It sounds amazing.  If my electronic skills stretched further than wiring pickups in I would totally build one.

I'll be building another on probably this weekend to debug that unverified vero I posted (that apparently doesn't work for some reason...).  Having said that, I've got this lot to get out of the way first!



From the left clockwise: a rehouse of a Small Clone, a Slow Gear clone, a couple of super hard on's (only one showing), a re-house of my old DAM Meathead clone to go alongside the Sonic Titan clone (now working) that's sat next to it.

[mikey5]

To juan solo where did you get schematics for your valve pedals? Also does having a valve in the pedal improve the tone of say a distortion. I am loving this stuff here it looks good. I am getting some books from indyguitar, and a couple of byoc kits.

[juansolo]

The valve pedals are probably my favorites by far. The first two are Matsumin Valvecasters with a EH LPB-1 on the front of them. I got the vero for them somewhere and have never been able to find where from to give credit where it's due. I've been through the massive thread on DIYStompBoxes and just never managed to find it, so here it is.



It's a very warm distortion. A great sound. Kick in the LPB and it can be cranked into a smoooooth fuzz. I love this pedal.

The second is an EH86 distortion that we frigged to use a 6BR7 as that is much cheaper and doesn't suffer from microphonics like the EH86 does. This is more of a boost/overdrive pedal, that with some optional clippers, can do a bit of distortion.



The last was the logical conclusion of the two. Using the valve boost of the 6BR7 in the place of the LPB-1 in front of the valvecaster for a single, all-valve pedal. To make it even more interesting the Valvevaster side of things is a Vibracaster tremolo (haven't got the schematic handy for that). Turn the depth all the way down and it operates like a valvecaster, turn it up and it's a tremolo. Very, very cool (and very big, there's three meters of wire in it!).

I'm not done with the valves either. I'm going to build a Twincaster (exactly what you'd expect it to be) and a twin sub-mini tube dirt pedal. I've got all the bits, I just need to get around to it.