Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

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

Post by jorri » Thu Nov 17, 2016 6:49 am

felixvaughn wrote:
jorri wrote:
felixvaughn wrote:I really want to build 2 or 3 pedals to sell, to fund buying parts to make more pedals.
I have researched pedal building for ages now and i am ready to get stuck in with a soldering iron and get to work, but I only have a horrible amp (fender frontman 15 with a torn speaker) to test my builds on.
I’m worried that if I get a circuit sounding good through my amp, it won’t sound good through the person who buys the pedal’s amp.
I don’t know anyone with a guitar amp or have a music store near me. I cannot afford to buy a new amp. I intend on replacing the speaker on my current one with pedal profit money.
I’m not a gear fetishizer, my amp really does sound awful. What advice do the pedal builders of osg have for me? Am I worrying too much?
Is this our very first build? I'd firstly say, that perhaps the first three by sod's law will usually need loads of debugging, and to probably build them for yourself rather than keeping up too much hope to get much more than the cost of parts back...
It depends what the pedal does really. Listening to it DI through headphones is usually a good test for levels of noise, and if its something that really warps the guitar's signal is pretty good indication of how the pedal will actually sound. You can sometimes expect e.g. an AC30 to take it differently, but then they aren't good at taking pedals, and i'd only worry about that if it were a specialist pedal. However amps will have different impedances so you can expect some changes with a fuzz, but probably not many other types of pedals. It might be possible to simulate EQ of amps with an amp-sim, from a bunch of free plugins, although this may or may not be sufficient if impedances change things, and certainly no-one yet claims are near the real deal...it just gives you a different tonality to run it through.
On the other hand, milder effects, especially ones that interact with an amp, I'd think it would be quite important. Anything like a preamp, boost or overdrive, and some fuzzes are interacting quite strongly.... If you want to put it through the full testing I'd say yes, try it with various amps, and even in a band situation perhaps too, as well as some super-clean DI stuff. Or at least one functioning guitar amp, depends how serious you want it to be.
Thanks for the advice. I've built a few circuits in the past but never boxed any of them up. I just remembered I have a usb interface that I could also use to try stuff through. I think I'm just gonna dive in and get started, will post updates on here once I get the ball rolling!
I'd say the main thing that you'd missed might be the odd squeal... Sometimes if you are building a rat, or modified versions of superfuzz and fuzz face had this, which only happens really when in a high impedance of unbuffered signal into amp. But those are more to do with proximity of components and wires in the circuits, not the actual circuit design itself. Also feedback loops would likewise be like this, they are meant to squeal! Might inversely not produce much even if they are working through the wrong input.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by s_mcsleazy » Tue Dec 06, 2016 1:08 pm

so after weeks of saying i'm going to build a second one. here it is. pharoah boost no.2
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i'm looking to repair my first one and put both in the same box for extra voxy trashy boosty grit.

then i got a few more builds to do and HOPEFULLY my board will be done.
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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by molwam » Sat Dec 10, 2016 3:04 pm

I didn't even know that there are so many pedal builders around here :freako: Lots of cool stuff!

These are my more or less recent builds:

A Triple Wreck clone with a charge pump and variable regulator so you can run it on anything between 9v-18v:
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A simple fuzz factory clone with switchable input cap:
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A Valvemaster runnig internaly on 100v via charge pump. Has a additional switchable tremolo:
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An Engineer's Thumb compressor
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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by p.eat » Sun Dec 11, 2016 4:27 am

Die sehen stark aus!

Are those your own PCB-Layouts?

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by molwam » Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:43 am

p.eat wrote:Die sehen stark aus!

Are those your own PCB-Layouts?
Dankeschön :)

Yes, I did the layouts, most of the time because I couldn't find any layouts which fited the parts I had at hand or did allow the mods I wanted to do.
It actually isn't a PCB, it is just an epoxy board with holes drilled to fit the components. The connections are done prefboard-style on the backside. I didn't like the way prefboard looks, its color and all the unused/unnecessary holes but wasn't keen on messing with the chemicals for etching real PCBs, so I thought this would be a nice tradeoff.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by Zork » Sun Dec 11, 2016 11:16 am

the decals are really cool. Nice designs, funny ideas ("try it!") and a very very clean overall execution. You even painted the inside of the enclosure of the engineers thumb, right? Wow!

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by molwam » Sun Dec 11, 2016 11:48 am

Zork wrote:the decals are really cool. Nice designs, funny ideas ("try it!") and a very very clean overall execution. You even painted the inside of the enclosure of the engineers thumb, right? Wow!
Thank you for the kind words :blush: I got a little obsessed with the engineer's thumb painting the inside. I probably won't do that again, since it's pretty seldom that someone looks inside my pedals :D

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by parry » Mon Jan 09, 2017 10:45 am

Just finished this treble booster.
Fairly straight-forward gritty, Rangemaster-ish treble booster, but it allows you to dial in bottom end. It gets pretty big, bass-y and wooly. The biggest surprise was using it somewhere in the middle, with the middle pickup position on my Jazzmaster. It was beautifully mid-y/jangle-y sounding.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by bdf83 » Thu Apr 27, 2017 7:10 am

Anyone got any tips for troubleshooting a temperamental wah wah? Got a crybaby but it kills the signal when it's engaged and generally sounds shitty. I'd rather not have to buy a new one but wouldn't know where to start with testing it out...

help please.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by Mad-Mike » Thu Aug 03, 2017 11:06 am

Well, I took the dive and started breadboarding this crazy mess of a Fuzz up - though it does have some GREAT sounds as well.....I started building it originally because I'm playing in a 90's cover band now and my 80's power-metal tube amp distortion just is not cutting it for all the bases I need, and I sold my Fuzz Factory awhile ago. Started off going for a Smashing Pumpkins "Today" sort of sound, got more of a Ric Ocasek thing off the bat (now there's a positive Omen if there ever was one)....but this thing makes a nutty amount of sounds - it's just a breadboard for now. Will probably start selling some once I'm done. Currently it's just a breadboard and I'm still working out some kinks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvpBB3uHP-U

I won't say too much about what's in this thing until I've started selling them (assuming that all works out) but let's just say, I started off with a 10-minute Fuzz circuit using ALL of the wrong component values and wrong Darlington Transistor - and cascaded more off of it, and went from there. Did reference some other pedals but did not copy them save for general structuring that EVERY fuzz pedal has with the type of transistors I'm using. I have a lot of tonal variety already and the circuit is pretty simple. Let's just say biasing has a LOT to do with what this sounds like, and I've been running it off of 5vdc until this Monday when I moved to a 9vdc adapter that was putting out 14.09vdc for some reason. Still sounds better to my ears than the Fuzz Factory, though I've not tried it through the Bugera yet, just through my Blackstar IDCORE 10 using the clean/bright setting. One thing I AM adding is a momentary push button to it so the glitch modes can be used for sonic punctuation and rhythm stabs or whatever.

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by millarman9111993 » Mon Dec 11, 2017 3:36 am

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by Shadoweclipse13 » Mon Dec 11, 2017 5:35 pm

millarman9111993 wrote:
Mon Dec 11, 2017 3:36 am
Boy have i got a lot to show you guys...
:D :D Congrats on the company and website by the way! Site looks great!! I saw the That Pedal Show episode where they had one of yours and thought it sounded great!!
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http://www.offsetguitars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=104282&p=1438384#p1438384

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by millarman9111993 » Sun Dec 24, 2017 8:18 am

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by Shadoweclipse13 » Mon Dec 25, 2017 10:09 am

That's awesome! Have to let us know when you get the update done. I'll have to check it out!
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http://www.offsetguitars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=104282&p=1438384#p1438384

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Re: The D.I.Y. thread.

Post by Odonian » Thu Feb 01, 2018 10:08 am

So much awesome stuff in here!!! I just built a BYOC Chancellor (guv'nor clone) which was my first DIY build!

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