Today, I put about an hour of effort into creating a guitar effect pedal. I figured I would start small and aimed to reproduce Mike Hayworth's simple distortion pedal since I had most of the parts already. I picked up some diodes, the mono jacks, and the NPN transistor from the Radio Shack down the street.
The first thing I learned when putting the circuit together is that soldering copper wire to the mono jacks is a pain. I could not get the solder to stick to the jack for the life of me. I must be missing some Soldering 101 skills.
After assembling the circuit, I did some minor troubleshooting (including realizing I neglected the k at the end of the resistor values--hot transistor is hot) and plugged it in between my guitar and amp to find a very pleasant fuzz effect. I would include a video, but there are two things I would like to troubleshoot. The first is that the pedal is not very loud so I need to figure out how to boost the outgoing signal. The second and most important problem is that the pedal is a fantastic radio receiver for a local station. It was very hard to her the pedal over the obnoxious radio broadcast that was being amplified through my tube amp. Once I resolve those two problems, I will permanently solder the project into a perf board and make a video. My overall goal is to make several different pedals and to be able to select though them, possibly with an Arduino interface. Below is a photo of the project so far (note, the 9V batter is not attached). Pretty simple, no?
The first thing I learned when putting the circuit together is that soldering copper wire to the mono jacks is a pain. I could not get the solder to stick to the jack for the life of me. I must be missing some Soldering 101 skills.
After assembling the circuit, I did some minor troubleshooting (including realizing I neglected the k at the end of the resistor values--hot transistor is hot) and plugged it in between my guitar and amp to find a very pleasant fuzz effect. I would include a video, but there are two things I would like to troubleshoot. The first is that the pedal is not very loud so I need to figure out how to boost the outgoing signal. The second and most important problem is that the pedal is a fantastic radio receiver for a local station. It was very hard to her the pedal over the obnoxious radio broadcast that was being amplified through my tube amp. Once I resolve those two problems, I will permanently solder the project into a perf board and make a video. My overall goal is to make several different pedals and to be able to select though them, possibly with an Arduino interface. Below is a photo of the project so far (note, the 9V batter is not attached). Pretty simple, no?
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