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 […]
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 […]
A Brief History Of Fuzz Pedals
September 24, 2024I love fuzz pedals. I love making fuzz pedals and I love playing guitar through fuzz pedals. Although different overdrives or distortions won’t sound the same, I find the variance in sound between these types of dirty pedal is much smaller than the variance in sound you get from different fuzzes. One fuzz circuit will […]
How Does A Drive, Gain, Or Distortion Knob Work?
September 17, 2024I’ve touched on this subject a lot, but I want to approach it differently now. Namely, from the perspective of the potentiometer that is controlling the gain in an overdrive, distortion, or fuzz pedal. When talking about this before, I’ve mostly gone through how clipping diodes work in guitar pedals and how they cause clipping […]
What Do Guitar Pedals Do?
September 10, 2024It didn’t occur to me to write this article, but I noticed that people were coming to this site asking “what do guitar pedals do” and ending up on my how do guitar pedals work article, which doesn’t really answer the question. So I decided to answer the question in order to help! All of […]
What Is Gain (And How It’s Different From Volume)
September 5, 2024This is going to be a fun article to write (not really), because the concept of gain is actually kind of elusive to define if you’re trying to be general. I’ve always understood the concept of gain as it pertains to guitar pedals (and general guitar oriented analogue electronics). However, as I did some research […]
How Do Guitar Pedal (And Guitar) Volume Knobs Work?
August 21, 2024Hopefully this article is going to be short and sweet, as the concept of volume knobs in guitar pedals (and guitars for that matter) is quite simple. This explanation should hold for volume control on analogue devices, however, I’m not sure if it holds for digital volume control; it probably does in a general sense, […]
How Do Guitar Pedals Work?
August 6, 2024If you’re a guitarist, you’ve probably used (or at least come across) a number of pedals. But effects pedals aren’t just used for guitars. They’re often used with other instruments. Guitar pedals are often built to work well with guitars, but they can be used with other instruments. Other more general effects pedals may be useful […]
