Ramblings of a mad musician

In the past few weeks or so, i have thrown myself head first into the world of “Do it yourself”.

I can hear people thinking, “Brendan!  DIY??? BWAHAHAH!!”

Yes thats right, im not the outdoors “Fully Loaded Man” type of person and really, who cares.

Never the less, its lead me down the track of re-learning all the stuff i learned in school and at home with numerous electronics kits and what not.

What ive been looking for is the right box to “enhance” my Marshall tone and found that in Australia, enhancing your tone is totally and utterly abhorrent’ly overpriced.

At first I thought, “Hmm, these pedals are rather expensive.”  Then i looked at the price of the Australian Dollar vs the US dollar and was gobsmacked.  At the time there was about 8 cents difference in value yet prices of parts and equipment in Australia are almost TRIPLE the cost they are in the USA.

I mean, REALLY, i can buy a unit from the USA, have it shipped here in less than 4 days (considering it takes 2 WEEKS to get book from a shop in Sydney) for almost a 1/4 the price of buying it here in Australia.

Thanks to our wonderful distributors and resellers, which i must say are in a tight spot.  Yes they need to make money too but there is ZERO need to try and extract a full dole cheque out of some unemployed musician trying to make a success of him or herself just for a simple effects unit that has less components in it as a TV REMOTE!! Which also explains why you can talk down the price of equipment at a music shop too, but you still need to have the money to begin with <end rant!>

I digress

I set about searching for more pedals and different designers etc and stumbeled across http://www.diyguitarist.com/

I saw all the pedals and variants he has built and it got me thinking, “This looks like something to investigate”. I moved my search in to schematics for effect pedals and found that there really wasnt much too them.  Ive never opened a pedal and had a look at the PCB before so it never crossed my mind to investigate and try this out myself.

After all the reading I did on Pauls website,  it lead me to the word of DIY, DO IT YOURSELF.  So i set about searching for more information on DIY effect units on Google and was swamped!  The wealth of information is staggering for the diy guitarist out there and there is SO much to learn.

I continued to search for some more information, videos and documents on DIY guitar effects and  found this video on youtube (a first of many DIY vids) belonging to Brian Wampler of Wampler Pedals http://www.wamplerpedals.com

I saw this video and BANG! i was hooked.  In the past three weeks ive had my head buried in books, schematics and even maths!  It has consumed alot of my time but has been a great experience of learning.

I bought a copy of Brians e-book on how to build effects and found what i needed to get started on building and designing my circuits, starting off with Brians Clean Booster circuit.

I tried this circuit out today with the Marshall and the Sunn T412 at rehearsals and OH MY! What a boost, albeit without any buffering or any other effects in the way or long cables.  The “thump” this thing gave to the sound was impressive to say the least for a basic prototype.

I made some changes to the original design in the ebook using the suggested LM386 IC plus added a high pass filter above 19kHz and a low pass at around 105hz.  This removes alot of rubbish not needed and trying to tighten up the tone to get what i want out of it.

Its quite basic at the moment but im sure it will get better as i go with the development of the unit, never the less, all this electronics stuff does not stop me from sussing out other pedals more for tonal ideas.

Stay tuned for the developments as i progress trying to make my tonal presence more alive sounding than dead digital

Wampler pedals have a couple of really good boutique pedals that are quite interesting:

EGO Compressor

PlexiDrive

Pinnacle Reissue

These are all great sounding overdrive pedals although along with your atypical Australian pricing.

Stay tuned for the next part of my quest for a “more than satisfactory” tone.