Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by i love sharin foo » Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:46 pm

TweedBassman wrote: lots of great stuff in here, good job folks.  :-*
Let's see some of your builds!!

I bet some people around here would love to read about the Rat Shack looper!! Myself included!

Justin
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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by i love sharin foo » Thu Oct 02, 2008 6:10 pm

I just received the Death by Audio Fuzz War from fellow member K o y l yesterday. (Great deal from a great forumite). For anyone not familiar with the pedal, it has a place on the circuit board that is labeled "add a cap"... trying different values of caps yields some interesting tones and causes the filter knob to  behave much differently than stock. I tried a whole bunch of different caps last night and settled on two that I liked. However, the stock sound was entirely different so I wanted to keep that, too. Soooo, I placed either cap on the outer poles of a DPDT toggle switch. But like I said, I wanted to keep the stock sound, too. So what I did was wired up a second DPDT switch. That one goes between stock mode and modified mode. Then when in modified mode, you can switch between the two different caps. I also cleaned up some of the shoddy solder joints on it while I had it apart. Next up I would like to move the internal gain trimemr to be a full sized pot mounted on the side of the enclosure. The filter control has a wide range too, which I think might be cool as an expression pedal input. I want to mock that up and see if it's cool enough to use or not. Not complicated mods by any means, but it is a LOT of fun!

Here's a couplepix:
The new toggles are up on the top left.
Image

Here you can see where the switches are mounted and also where the wires attach to the board.
Image

And here is a close shot of the switches themselves.. they were salvaged from a previous build, so the lugs have been reheated a few times, making them kind of crooked.
Image

justin
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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by JazzBlaster » Thu Oct 02, 2008 7:41 pm

noirengineer wrote: diagrams or schematics?
It's the internet... it's called "Google" and it's not hard to use  ;)  :P
It's not about the gear! It's about you, your hands, your imagination, your feelings.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by yaksox » Thu Oct 02, 2008 11:00 pm

i love sharin foo wrote: ... trying different values of caps yields some interesting tones and causes the filter knob to  behave much differently than stock. I tried a whole bunch of different caps last night and settled on two that I liked.
I'd be interested to hear what you think of the sound of different tone capacitors that you tried.

I was almost going to start a thread about them. I did a search back thru but only came up with a thread that was mostly about whether tone caps (in guitars) make any difference or not.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by JazzBlaster » Thu Oct 02, 2008 11:51 pm

I was interested in a fuzz war but Greg said his wasn't very loud.  ???
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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by i love sharin foo » Sat Oct 04, 2008 8:19 am

noirengineer wrote: I appreciate this thread... would totally be interested in building some of these clones.
anyone have any diagrams or schematics?
Check out:
freestompboxes.org
generalguitargadgets.com

That's where I have found most of the info needed to build  most of mine.


JazzBlaster wrote: I was interested in a fuzz war but Greg said his wasn't very loud.  ???
While not something that you could really use to pummel the front end of an amp, it does gets fairly loud with my setup right now. I have been running it into a Moogerfooger ring modulator, then straight into an AC30CC with it's preamp dimed and the poweramp pulled back. It definitely isn't FuzzFactory loud, but there is much more volume than unity. It might be sensitive to what other pedals are around it though.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by daydreamdelay » Sat Oct 04, 2008 1:58 pm

great idea and work on that mod  8)

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by Jay » Sun Oct 05, 2008 8:25 pm

Schaller trem I finished up today.  Used some really cool knobs I picked out of a huge box full of crap at the swap meat.  :)  Blinking LED is a little dim and so I need to fix that and it's also a little dark sounding and slightly below unity gain so I need to see if I can address that as well.  Otherwise, I'm pleased as punch.  This is a cool trem that does some pretty serious chop.

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Last edited by Jay on Sun Oct 05, 2008 8:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by i love sharin foo » Mon Oct 06, 2008 12:12 pm

Nice work Jay! It looks great. I've always wondered how that circuit sounds. I might build one of them one day.
noirengineer wrote: hey justin.   could you post the gut shots of Zvex "The Machine" and "SHO"
clones.  If you have em, and it's not a pain. would love to see the innards!
The machine is pretty messy.. I had a tough time fitting the board in the small enclosure and there are wires everywhere  ???. I already have some shops of the SHO though. I can post them when I get home this evening.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by i love sharin foo » Mon Oct 06, 2008 2:40 pm

Here's my SHO clone:
Image

I used some prebonded wire taht was pretty stiff so that I could mount the board on its side. That way I don't have to worry about any traces grounding out or anything. Plus I could make a lot of the wires shorter that way. I didn't really plan on doing it this way.. it just happened to work out a little easier.
Image

I had one of the tiny little PCB mount pots to use, but the leads weren't long enough to make the 'every other hole' layout on the stripboard that I needed. I was going to just use the clipped legs of a couple caps to extend them, but then I just ended up using wire because it was a little easier to work with.
Image

Image

Overall, it's not the prettiest I've made, but it works great. It sounds just like the real one that I had before. I like this circuit a lot.

justin
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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by TweedBassman » Mon Oct 06, 2008 3:06 pm

i love sharin foo wrote:
TweedBassman wrote: lots of great stuff in here, good job folks.  :-*
Let's see some of your builds!!

I bet some people around here would love to read about the Rat Shack looper!! Myself included!

Justin
ahhh yeah the radio shack looper. man, i REALLY gotta finish up the DIY on that one, so many people ask about it:

Image

it's the old style 20 second analog voice recorder that radio shack used to sell, hacked into a guitar looper. based of the instructables how-to.  right switch is bypass, left switch is record/play; left toggle selects mode (rec or play), right toggle selects continuous loop or one shot playback (plays each time the footswitch is activated).  the mix knob controls how much signal is sent to the recorder (you can overdrive it if ya want for nasty samples) and on playback, it controls the blend of loop level to dry guitar.

pretty lo-fi, dirty sampler that is hard to make perfect loops with, BUT the best part by far is the 'speed' knob; you need to record at full speed, but during playback you can slow the playback down to a crawl, making the original sample unidentifiable. 16th note blasts become super-downtempo warbling messed up drumbeats; slower recorded stuff become washes of noise with occasional blips and swells. besides dirt and delay, my most used pedal.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by mezcalhead » Tue Oct 07, 2008 1:52 am

Some great stuff in here. Someday Id like to have most of my signal chain going through stuff I made myself.
i love sharin foo wrote: I used some prebonded wire taht was pretty stiff so that I could mount the board on its side.
Very clever .. that board is tiny, you could've used an even smaller box .. !
Distance-crunching honcho with echo unit.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by i love sharin foo » Tue Oct 07, 2008 6:52 am

mezcalhead wrote:
Very clever .. that board is tiny, you could've used an even smaller box .. !
Definitely!

If the pot would have been mounted directly to the board with jumpers, it would be REALLY compact. You could fir it into one of those tiny little boxes like Catalinbread uses for a few models. Also, you could fit one into the same case as some other pedals and make the boost switchable. It's the perfect pair for gain pedals that lack volume,among other things.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by mezcalhead » Wed Oct 08, 2008 8:30 am

Hidden in the rhythm circuit?
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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by Superfuzz » Wed Oct 08, 2008 11:40 am

This is a pedal that I custom built for my brother..in the same box you have an amp channel switcher and a sort of hotrodded LPB-1 that's capable of some interesting fuzzed sounds and it also get sparkly when the fuzz control is turned back..that's the first pedal wich I spent some time on the graphics..I'm very satisfied  :)
Image
and the innards..wiring has been a little messy since I've done a lot of errors while soldering  :-[
Image
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