Some of my previous DIY pedal builds.

[DrNomis_44]

Hi everyone,

I thought I would start yet another thread about some DIY pedals I've built, these are guitar FX pedals I have built myself in the past few years, and after talking to Wokka on another thread I thought you guys might like to check them out, I will be posting pics and links to sound demos of the pedals, note that I only have two of the pedals I have built at home, the rest are either at Uni or at a friends place.


To start things off, here's a pic of my build of a Dallas Rangemaster Vintage Treble Booster pedal, this pedal is based on a very well-known pedal used by some famous guitarists to get their sound, featuring a single Germanium Transistor, it was originally intended to brighten dark sounding guitar amps that were common in the early 60's in England, but, Guitarists soon found that they could use the Rangemaster to overdrive an already distorting amp to get a sweeter more overdriven sound, to my ears it seems to make the tone a bit more midrangey with some extra upper presence that can cut through the mix, a good example is the tone Tony Iommi got on the first Black Sabbath album.

It's a very simple circuit and most of the components are mounted on an 8-way tagstrip with a couple of the parts strung between a solder tag and one of the solder lugs on the footswitch, an old school way of building FX pedals.


It's interesting to note that an original Vintage Rangemaster can go for silly amounts of money nowadays, considering that there's at most about $50.00 worth of parts in them.

Original Rangemasters used the OC44 Germanium Transistor but my build uses an AC128, anyway, here's a couple of pics of the pedal:



Sound demo coming soon so stay tuned.


Okay I've just managed to get together a quick and dirty sound demo of my Rangemaster pedal, the signal chain was from my LP Studio to the Rangemaster pedal, then straight into my Saffire Pro 40 into Audacity, this was done so you can hear the raw tone of the pedal by itself, I had to reduce the recording level on the fly as i turned up the Boost knob on the Rangemaster so I wouldn't overdrive the Saffire Pro 40's input, the slight clipping you hear towards the end is the AC128 Transistor starting to distort as I strum harder, the first few chord strums are with the pedal bypassed:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...angemaster.mp3

[DrNomis_44]

Here's another one of my DIY pedal builds, this time it's a pedal based on one made famous by Jimi Hendrix and Robin Trower...it's the UniVibe, my build has a bit of a twist to it because in between the two footswitches there's a three-position switch that allows you to select between three different voicings, UniVibe, Reslytone, and Voodoo Vibe, each setting has a slightly different character, I also made a remote speed control pedal for it so you can control the speed of the effect on-the-fly, the left-hand footswitch is used to select either the Chorus or Vibrato modes in each of the three voicings, the right-hand footswitch engages or bypasses the effect, here's a pic of the UniVibe, I'll add a pic of the insides after my phone has finished recharging:


Here's some soundclips of each of the voicings of my UniVibe in both the Chorus and Vibrato modes:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...e%20Chorus.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...%20Vibrato.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...one_Chorus.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ne_Vibrato.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...doo_Chorus.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...do_Vibrato.mp3



When you listen to the sound that the UniVibe generates you'll notice that the effect is very subtle at low speeds, but it becomes more prominent as the speed gets faster, this is normal and original vintage UniVibes behaved like this too, the UniVibe is actually a Phaser and was originally meant to sound like the Leslie Rotating Speakers used with Hammond B3 Tonewheel Organs, it was originally designed by a Japanese Electronics Engineer named Fumio Mieda who worked for a company in Japan called Shin Ei.

[wokkaboy]

good stuff Doc, would be cool to hear some sound demo's of these effects compared to the dry signal

[DrNomis_44]

good stuff Doc, would be cool to hear some sound demo's of these effects compared to the dry signal

No worries, I'll see if I can get that all sorted out tonight then mate, I've already got soundclips of the UniVibe in my dropbox so I can just post some links of them in the UniVibe post, stay tuned.

[keloooe]

Snazzy lookin pedals there Doc!

[DrNomis_44]

Snazzy lookin pedals there Doc!

Cheers mate, I'm thinking of doing a repaint job on my UniVibe pedal and maybe re-do the labeling on it soon, maybe next year, feel free to check out the demo clips I posted.


I'll see if I can post some more examples of my pedal builds.

[DrNomis_44]

Okay, here's another example of my DIY pedal builds, this time it's one of the Grandaddys of Fuzz, a real old-school one made famous by Jimi Hendrix, it's the Fuzz Face, a very simple two-transistor device that was designed and marketed by Ivor Arbiter in England in about 1966 or so, here are pics of the pedal and insides:


And here are some soundclips so you can hear what it sounds like:


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...Min%20Fuzz.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...alf%20Fuzz.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ull%20Fuzz.mp3

[DrNomis_44]

Next is my Baja Real Tube Overdrive pedal, the Baja Real Tube Overdrive pedal is based on the well known BK Butler Tube Driver and uses a real Tube/Valve to generate Valve Distortion, here are a couple of pics and some sound clips with three different Valves installed in the pedal:


Baja RTO Soundclips:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...RTO_12AU7A.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...0RTO_12AT7.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...TO_12AX7EH.mp3

[keloooe]

Digging the sounds Nomis! So much sustain in the last demo! Clips real nice, what guitar / setup you running this all through?

[DrNomis_44]

Digging the sounds Nomis! So much sustain in the last demo! Clips real nice, what guitar / setup you running this all through?

If my memory serves me right, I was playing my Mexican Strat straight into the pedal and then straight into my Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, and then into Audacity which I used to record the audio, I did it that way in order to capture the raw sound of the pedals I recorded.