Is It Expensive To Make Your Own Guitar Pedals?
July 25, 2024If you’re looking to get into making DIY guitar pedals, you’re probably wondering if it’s an expensive hobby. After all, guitar pedals made by major manufacturers can be 100’s of dollars, with pedals made by boutique builders can be even more… The short answer is no, making your own guitar pedals isn’t that expensive, especially when […]
What Is Transistor hFE?
July 23, 2024Transistors are used a lot in guitar pedals. Sometimes they’re used for a general signal boost to create a clean boost pedal like a ZVEX Super Hard On, sometimes they’re used as building block as part of a larger pedal design, and sometimes they’re used to create awesome fuzz pedals. All in all, transistors are […]
What’s The Difference Between Symmetrical And Asymmetrical Clipping?
July 17, 2024When it comes to clipping sound signals, typically in guitar pedals, you’ll often hear about symmetrical and asymmetrical clipping. Although clipping guitar signals (and any audio signal for that matter) can be done through a variety of ways, when talking about symmetrical and asymmetrical clipping, people are specifically talking about clipping diodes in guitar pedals. […]
How To Use A Distortion Or Overdrive Pedal
July 12, 2024If you want to add a little more oomph to your sound, it’s common to use an overdrive or distortion pedal. The two affects have similarities, but there is a difference between overdrive and distortion. Overdrive and distortion are kind of the core guitar effects; if you ask what are guitar pedal does, OD and […]
What Is True Bypass In Guitar Pedals?
July 11, 2024Whether you’re looking to learn how to build guitar pedals or just into guitar pedals in general, you’ve probably heard the term “true bypass.” While it’s somewhat obvious what the term true bypass implies, personally, I was 100% certain what it was and wanted to better understand what it is. Also, if there’s a true […]
What’s The Difference Between Overdrive, Distortion, And Fuzz?
July 9, 2024Whether you’re just getting started with guitar effects pedals or already have a collection (whether you’re building them or buying them), you’ve probably heard of overdrive, distortion, and fuzz. Maye you’ve heard these terms used interchangeably or heard they’re similar, but you don’t really know the difference. Gear heads could probably go on and on […]
How To Wire Guitar Pedal Enclosures
July 5, 2024So you’ve finished soldering your guitar pedal circuit, you’ve debugged it and it’s working, so it’s time to put it into an enclosure. Well done. Wiring up a guitar pedal enclosure can be a daunting task. It seems like the easy part after getting a pedal’s circuit working, but getting a pedal enclosure wired well […]
Vox Tone Bender On Stripboard
June 28, 2024https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ8r3H4Ztj8 Here’s the Vox Tone Bender, a great early fuzz pedal that’s sure to please. The build I’ve done here is the NPN version of the pedal, so it’s slightly different from the original, which used PNP transistors. The big difference here is that this NPN layout allows for negative ground, putting inline with the […]
How To Wire A Guitar Pedal DC Power Jack
June 26, 2024Although it’s important to correctly place and solder in every guitar pedal component, at the end of any pedal build, perhaps the most important thing to get right is wiring the power supply. Sure, there are passive pedals out there that don’t require a power supply, but most of what you’re building is going to […]
How To Find The Audio Signal Path For A Guitar Pedal
June 21, 2024Part of building DIY guitar pedals is creating something that doesn’t work then figuring out how to fix it. This is all part of the process of debugging guitar pedal builds. These things are hand built, after all, and even experts make mistakes from time to time. One of the common problems with a home […]
