What Is Gain Stacking And How Do You Do It?
January 16, 2025If you’ve been playing around with pedals like overdrive, distortion, or fuzz (especially overdrive), you’ve probably tried combining the two to see what happens. If you’re just fooling around without thinking about it, it may not sound very good, but done with some consideration and calculation, stacking pedals can have a lot of benefits and […]
How To Get Started Building Guitar Effects Pedals
January 8, 2025I’ve been putting off writing this article because it’s kind of a big question. If you’ve spent any time poking around my site, you’ll know a lot of it is set up to try and help newbies to the marvelous hobby of DIY guitar pedals. It can be hard to know where and how to […]
Electro-Harmonix Big Muff On Stripboard
January 3, 2025https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ni48979_ws&feature=youtu.be Well, this was a fun pedal to build. It was a big build, but well worth it to make such a famous pedal. And one that sounds so good too. We’re all likely familiar with the Big Muff sound and, if you’re not, just check out music by Pink Floyd, White Stripes, Carlos Santana, […]
EartherQuaker Devices Speaker Cranker On Stripboard
January 2, 2025The Speaker Cranker by EarthQuaker Devices is an easy to make single knob guitar pedal. EarthQuaker Devices are calling this an overdrive but, judging by the schematic and the sound, I’d be more likely to call this pedal a distortion (and there is a difference between distortion, overdrive, and fuzz). That being said, I’ve just […]
Catalinbread Naga Viper On Stripboard
December 17, 2024The Naga Viper by Catalinbread is a treble booster pedal modelled on the somewhat legendary Dallas Rangemaster treble booster popularised by so many guitarists (especially out of England) in the 1960’s and ’70’s. These were the days before overdrive and distortion pedals; sure they had fuzz pedals (here’s a history of fuzz pedals if you’re […]
How To Make A Distortion Pedal
December 12, 2024I’ll cut to the chase very quickly: you’re probably here because you want to learn how to make guitar pedals at home, so you searched for something along the lines of “how to make a distortion pedal,” and found this website. Welcome! The good/easy part of answering that question is, sure, read on and I’ll give […]
2024: A Year In DIY Guitar Pedals
December 10, 2024We still have a few more weeks left in the year, and in that time I’ll probably make another guitar pedal, but I also haven’t been writing a lot here. I feel like I should post but I don’t have the the patience to write something more technical, so an end of year wrap up […]
Marshall Bluesbreaker On Stripboard
December 4, 2024Here’s how to build a Marshall Bluesbreaker on stripboard. Sure, this thing isn’t anywhere as popular as something like an Ibanez Tube Screamer or a Boss OD-1, but it’s a guitar pedal that’s been increasing in popularity in recent years. The Marshall Bluesbreaker is designed to sound like the old Marhsall amps Eric Clapton used […]
Colorsound One Knob Fuzz On Stripboard
November 14, 2024This One Knob Fuzz by Colorsound is a great DIY pedal project is you’re looking for an easy or beginner guitar pedal build. As the name would suggest, there’s only one knob (for volume) and, being a fuzz pedal, there aren’t that many components to work with. Like so many single knob pedals, like this […]
Lumpy’s Tone Shop Lemon Drop On Stripboard
November 7, 2024Here’s a fun pedal build project: Lumpy’s Tone Shop Lemon Drop. This pedal actually comes in a variety of names though. I wasn’t familiar with Lumpy’s Tone Shop, but found the stripboard layout on Tagboard Effects. In looking into this pedal, it looks like Lumpy’s Tone Shop is now going by the name Electric Majik, […]
