Home Built Guitar Effects
Fuzz Face Clone
My first effect, I bought a kit from Vintage Radio Spares with genuine NOS germanium AC128 transistors. I can't stress enough how amazing matched germanium transistors sound.
DOD440 Clone
I built this one from a circuit board I purchased from General Guitar Gadgets. The original schematic has a sound that can only be described as 'subtle' so I swapped out the 470k resistor R5 for a 2M2 resistor and the pedal sounds absolutely wicked.
Self explanatory. This thing makes even the most dull amps sparkle. The visible knob is volume, but the pedal has an internal trimpot to control distortion. In retrospect it was a stupid idea to put the distortion control inside, but I'll fix it one day.
This one is the Thunderchief from runoffgroove.com an excellent site with a ton of great designs. I was shocked at how good this pedal sounds and, in my opinion, models tube amps. This pedal left me with the feeling that I need to experiment with the JFET/tube modeling design a lot more because the results are amazing. Frankly, I don't like the low pass filter meant to model speakers that this design contains and the pedal is in pieces on my floor waiting to be reassembled sans speaker simulator. I'll get to it soon.
So this is the first pedal I personally designed. Like the Plexi Box the design uses JFETs to simulate a tube amplifier. In this case I chose the Fender Bassman AA864 and tweaked the circuit for a ton of bass gain with the hope of making the ultimate bass distortion pedal. As all things go, I made some strange choices and in retrospect I would have done this pedal very differently with what I learned while building it. Ironically, with the bass set to minimum and the treble to max the pedal serves as a great lead distortion for guitar.
Fuzz You
Meant to be my ultimate fuzz, this was my first failure. There are so many problems with this pedal, I don't want to talk about it right now.
Light overdrive pedal build around some 2N2222 transistors. Based on a non-working fuzz design I found on the web.
Ibanez Tube Screamer vs. MXR Distortion+. This guy was designed by me from scratch. It has a mix knob that blends the two sounds produced by soft and hard diode clipping.
