The D.I.Y. FX Pedal Building Thread

[DrNomis_44]

Update:


Okay, so I've got all the mounting holes drilled in the Aluminium Box I'm using to house my EH Big Muff, and I'll be taking pics of the rest of the build process as I'm wiring it all up, will be posting all the pics I take after I've finished testing the pedal, and will also do a write up when I post them, stay tuned for more updates.

[kimball492]

Interesting Doc look forward to your demo

[DrNomis_44]

Interesting Doc look forward to your demo

Hi Kimball,

I have just finished work on building the pedal, I had a couple of problems with it but managed to sort it out, and the pedal is now fully working, it's 2:09am so I'm going to leave doing the demo till the morning and go get some sleep, I've got pics of the build process to post, but I'll leave that till the morning too.

[kimball492]

No hurries on the Demo Doc. Do it when you have time.
Cheers

[DrNomis_44]

Here we go, here are the pics I was taking with my digital camera while doing all the wiring up:


As in the previous pedal build, the first thing I did was to mark out the positions of the mounting holes in the aluminum case and drill them to the correct size:




Next thing was to do a test fit of all the parts that mount on the aluminum case:



This should give you a bit of an idea what the pedal is going to look like when finished, I decided to lay out the controls in a Triangle shape like the original Big Muff:




Next thing to do was to wire up all the ground connections prior to doing the control wiring and installing the circuit board:



At this point all the control wiring, and all the in/out wiring, etc has been done:

[DrNomis_44]

Next thing to do was to solder each wire to it's correct connection point on the circuit board:




And finally, here's the finished and working EH Big Muff pedal, I had a couple of things to fix on the circuit board before I got it working but those were only minor problems, fortunately they were easy to fix, the pedal sounds really fat with lots of gain:

[wokkaboy]

excellent job Doc, very neat build. Why don't you look at printing a cool design for the top ?

[DrNomis_44]

excellent job Doc, very neat build. Why don't you look at printing a cool design for the top ?

Cheers mate, and I will do that a bit later on after I give the case a spray paint, for the time being I'm going to leave it as is because I'm taking it out to my mate's place for a jam session on Friday.

I'm thinking of spray painting it Soft Silver, or metallic grey.


I'll see if I can get a demo of it recorded so you can hear what it sounds like.

[wokkaboy]

sounds good Doc, can't wait to hear it in action

[DrNomis_44]

sounds good Doc, can't wait to hear it in action

Just finished recording a rough demo, I'm going to edit it and then I'll post a dropbox link to it once it's all ready, shouldn't take very long so stay tuned.


Okay as promised, here's a link to the demo of my EH Big Muff build, at the start of it, I've recorded it straight with no amp simulator plugins, just so you can hear what the pedal sounds like on it's own, I start off with the Sustain control at minimum and sweep the tone control from low to high so you can get an idea of the range of tone the pedal is capable of, next I set the tone to about the 12:00 position and then slowly crank up the gain so you can hear the amount of gain it's capable of, the second half of the demo is me playing the pedal through BIAS, an amp simulator plugin, I'm using the JCM900 Clean preset so you can hear what it sounds like through an amp, I used my LP Studio to record the demo, the first half was recorded with the bridge pickup, and the second half was also recorded with the bridge pickup, but I switched to the neck pickup towards the end for a bit of soloing so you can get an idea of what kind of lead tone you can get from an EH Big Muff:


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...uff%20Demo.mp3