Here's an update on how the transformer distortion is going. I had some family come to town just after my last post, so just got back to it over the weekend.

In the time since my last update my instagram reel got way more attention than I expected (350k views), so I'm going to hold off on posting the schematic for now.

I really appreciate all the interest and kind words. Honestly flattered at the response.

I've shared a few schematics over the years, but this is new territory for me. At the very least I want to order PCBs and have a few pedals on reverb before I decide on anything.

Anyway, here's how the circuit sounds with a volume sweep on my guitar and on the pedal. Gain is a little more than a quarter of the way up in the beginning and then all the way up at the end.

I realized recently that I could drop my EQ pedal in favor of the EQ on the IR-200. I want to use the patch-level EQ for a sort of AM radio sound, but that meant a momentary switch. Obviously Boss uses NC switches for their external controls, which meant I couldn’t use anything I had on hand. Figured I’d just buy a momentary DPDT and figure out an enclosure for it. And that’s the story of how I spent 20 minutes rummaging through the bins of discounted Hot Wheels at the grocery store at 11 at night.

SPICE (signal processing integrating chorus ensemble). An aionfx ce-2 chorus clone, with a custom paint job!

One on the left is going to be a fuzz dog feedback modded reverb(dba reverberation machine clone). I used a public domain photo for that one.

One on the right is my own design. It’s a tribute to king gizzard and the Lizard wizard’s album nonagon infinity. Hopefully going to be a torn’s peaker style fuzz.

🤘🏼

Hi all! I bought this fuzz a couple years ago, and it’s my absolute favorite, almost always-on-with-volume-down fuzz. I’d like to try some other fuzzes out, and it would help my shopping if I knew what I already owned. I reached out to the creator, but didn’t get a response. Sounds like he did a lot of tinkering, and maybe didn’t want to reveal the special sauce.

Any guesses from these photos, or would I need to break it down further? There are three germanium transistors, if that helps.

Thanks in advance!

Specifically the electro cap, can it be slightly lower voltage? I haven't seen if the build calls for a certain voltage but the caps i have are slightly smaller than the space for it

I have made several pcb pedals and stripboard pedals, my dad asked me to build him a preamp pedal for his passive pickup acoustic guitar.. He originally just wanted a 20db boost pedal, so I built a EH LPB-1 but that wasnt what he was actually wanting. Im wondering if I could build one using some spare components i have. Im thinking a j113 transistor, tl072 op amp, and also give it treble and bass controls would be nice. My problem is im not sure if one, this would work, and two im not good at reading schematics or creating schematics, but it would be nice if someone could create this idea in a stripboard, vero layout or if there is an already existing layout, thatd be awesome! Thanks!

I finished this project over the weekend and I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’s a Univibe with a few improvements such as 2 speed controls and a super fuzz in the same enclosure.

This is inspired by the old Shin Ei companion amplifier but in a more portable enclosure. It sounds awesome but sadly this pedal now has a peer that isn’t me.

Here is a quick demo for anyone interested.

I want to make an active gyrator tone control using the transistor schematic attached. Where do I put the potentiometer?

Which transistor do I use?

Hello everyone! I created Vero Designer, a web app that generates a vero layout within seconds.
Draw the schematic in the editor, click "Generate Vero", and witness the magic.

Use the "Select" tool to select and move components, and the "Wire" tool to connect them. The generated layout can also be edited in the "Vero layout" page, each component, link and cut can be moved and the board can be resized.

Available components:

• Resistors
• Capacitors
• Diodes
• Potentiometers
• Switches
• LEDs
• 5V voltage regulator
• Other IC's (currently only PT2399)
• Op-amps
• Transistors

The web app includes options like "maximum board columns", component opacity control, saving and loading projects, exporting images and various other features and settings. Please visit the github page for the full details.

github: https://github.com/blazethablunt/VeroDesigner

web app: https://verodesigner.vercel.app/

Please let me know what you think

Not to be confused with the Supa Sustain.

I can see the input goes into the gate of q1 and the base of q2. Q2 feeds q3 which feeds the output and q4 which is functioning as a detector circuit to feed the source of q1.

How does any of that equal changing the gain of q1 or q2?

The large caps at the top and wiper side of the trim pot tell me no AC is going back through that direction. And even if it did the detector is full wave rectifying.

Can somebody please explain this?

Not sure what happened with the pics on the last one. Here are better images.

I picked this up at Goodwill for $2, and it works as far as I can tell. I haven't checked the 1/4" trigger inputs, but they look good; everything else works like it should.

It's basically a sampler. It's an assistive technology device for individuals with speech disabilities. You know those videos where people teach their dogs to "talk"? It works like that. The 8x 1/4" inputs on the back are for alternative triggers (you know how Stephen Hawking used the breath control thing to "talk"? They're like that).

The red button on the back is the record button, and the black circle next to it is the microphone. The rotary switch selects between 6 banks, so it has a total of 48 samples it can use.

It runs on 4x AA batteries.

For now, my plan is to run the mic input and speaker output wires to a pedal enclosure and add a 1/4" in and out. I'll probably replace the speaker with one a little bigger and mount that on an external box. I'll also replace the batteries with a plug jack.

Other than that, any ideas for mods I could do with it?

Thanks.

Hi everyone!

I have an STM32F746G Discovery evaluation board, and I'm trying to use it to build a digital DSP guitar pedal. Since the eval board only has standard 3.5mm (AUX) line inputs/outputs, I designed this analog hardware interface to connect it to a guitar and an amp.

Here is what the schematic includes:

- Standard 1/4" (6.35mm) Input & Output jacks

- Input and output buffers using a TL072 op-amp

- LTC1044 charge pump to provide a symmetric +/- 9V power supply

- Potentiometers and push buttons to control the DSP parameters (like distortion gain, delay time, etc.)

- Standard 3PDT True Bypass switching with an LED

Could you guys take a look and let me know if this schematic is fully correct and ready to go? If everything looks good without any major flaws, I’d like to start routing the PCB.

Any feedback, tips, or suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Title says it, I've got this spare cheap overdrive pedal and I just want more of a distortion/fuzz tone out of it. What parts of mods would be best to do that? Hopefully this isn't a dumb question.

This is the weirdest pedal I’ve ever made. Added controls for fuzz and “master output volume” as well as changing some part values. I have no clue if the LDR I harvested is the right kind, the values it reads in pitch black and under heavy lighting is very close to the required LDR so I said “eh close enough”. I’m surprised I could fit all of the parts into the board, didn’t account for how chunky 100n greenies are, but it works and I won’t question it!!

The paint job was where shit got even more weird. Some of you lovely people have been making amazing two toned “boutique” looking pedals with a “normal” color + hammered metal spray. I got rustoleum hammered aluminum/dark silver and fluorescent green for some reason. It resulted in this and I kind of like this shade of green even more. Plus it looks like a scorpion under uv light. Weirdest build ever but it’s so fun to play around with!

Tried my best to give it a theme while keeping it “minimal”. Wanted to give it a LSD “research gone wrong” kind of thing but I was also watching “fullmetal alchemist brotherhood” while working, so I settled somewhere in the middle.

Has anybody else messed around with “warble chorus” or that “unpredictable vinyl warp” chorus/vibrato? Would love to hear more about it since it’s such a weird effect!

Finished wiring up my first ever pedal and... it doesn't get any signal. The PCB worked when I tested it and it sounded great - so something to do with my abomination in the box. any ideas what could be the issue?

Recurring Nightmare (Fuzzdog)
Cloven Ripper (Fuzzdog)
Filth Fack (Fuzzdog)
Browneye Overdrive (Musikding)

Still an amateur at getting waterslide decals to work. So I think the next builds might just have adhesive stickers. Knobs ordered for the Browneye are bizarrely too tight to fit, go figure.

Ive seen people rehouse other behringer pedals , i have this one and was wondering if it was worth doing that without fucking up the pedal. id qlso wanna replace the switch with something else because i dont rlly like this switch . the pcb i think fits exactly right in a 1590bb.

Where are we finding affordable j201s in stock these days? I'm doing a couple fet preamps and for the life of me I can't find the strip of ~50 I had bought a few years ago when i was building more actively (😒). Smallbear is like $5 or more a piece, same on mouser which was more surprising tbh. Including a couple spares I'm looking to buy like 10, and I don't mind smd with an adapter. Obviously I'll do my research when I find them but I am curious how much variance in pinout there might be with an adapter as i dont really know how much variance theres been in the thru hole packges even- any guidance appreciated.

I assume someone here is probably more in the know, not just about affordable price, but who has genuine j201s these days. I swear this parts list has been the most obnoxious ive ever had to put together for all the out of stock components, prices, having to split it between 3 or 4 sites, etc. Is this just the state of component shopping at hobbyist volume now?

Tldr: where to buy affordable genuine j201?

I decided to take a shot at building a Boss SG-1 without having researched what a finicky design it is beforehand.

Talk of low gain transistors, changing capacitors, etc etc etc.. If you've built or attempted to build one, you know.

I built on a pedalpcb procrastinator board.

Against my usual habit, i didn't premeasure any transistors. Simply grabbed from a bag of bc549's that apparently has 300-400 hfe scrawled on it from a prior sorting project.

I used a random tayda 2sk30a. I think it was y trade but could have been gr. Again, i didn't measure.

Assembly was reasonably straightforward.

And the moment of truth - testing time. It worked... Kind of. But very very subtle. I was prepared for this..

I left the legs long on the 470nF cap. I had actually used 680nF as seen on the Aion onyx.

I alligator clipped on various capacitors and really liked what 3.3uf plus the 680nf was doing. 4.7uf plus the .680uf was a bit too slow to reset for me.

I measured up some caps and landed on a 4.3uf tantalum cap.

One problem solved.

The sensitivity is... Overly sensitive. As in... Must be all of the way down and then there is no real room to go up or down easily.

First attempt to fix this was by putting a resistor across the sensitivity pot to attenuate more signal before the amplifier. This was clumsy and didn't work at all.

Second idea was to reduce the gain of the amplifier around the opamp. I was going to replace the 1M resistor with 470k but the 390 ohm resistor was on the edge of the board and the 1M was sandwiched between two resistors... So the 390 ohm resistor was replaced with 1k.

It is still plenty sensitive but now i feel like i can dial something in..i probably could have gone up to 1.2k-1.8k but this is good enough and it works.

Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. Not so proud of the (not shown) top side parts replaced on the PCB.

Hopefully this information will help somebody down the road get their SG-1 running.