DIY Pedals

The Lounge Other Gear
#1

Hello all,

I fancy trying my hand at some DIY pedal building. Does anyone have advice on good kits and suppliers? FYI, I’m in the UK, and haven’t built a pedal before… But I solder cables regularly and build lamps, so I should be able to figure it out ok - I like a challenge, and I’m a very quick study!

I’m keen to try:

  • distortion stuff, something that would replicate the high gain / classic distortion settings of Analog Heat
  • modulation, along the lines of shallow water or Boss DC-2
  • passive band pass filters, if this even exists in DIY pedal form

I’ll be using on sends from my mixer, for synths and all manner of Kontakt instruments etc. so it’d be great if they can handle line level signals and have a full frequency response - not something that sucks low frequencies.

Any advice welcome!

DIY kits
#2

You could try modding some Boss Pedals, I’ve had some good fun switching out capacitors or adding potentiometers here and there. The older models have their schematics floating around everywhere so you’re not completely in the dark on what you’re doing, just in case.

edit: oh and also the Korg Monotrons are pretty inviting to be modded, you can look at these too. Unless you wanna go completely DIY, then scratch that.

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#3

Fuzzdog are a good place to start for kits.

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#4

A passive ring modulator is a great first diy effect build. Two transformers, four diodes, and three jacks.

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#5

Also - sorry, I was in a bit of a rush before - there’s Jeds Peds:

They have a list of what most of their pedals are based on, which might be useful in finding one that suits your needs:

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#6

This site has a lot of pedal designs that you can build yourself. Read the comments and see if someone has built and confirmed it. There’s also a store for PCBs, but no whole kits afaik. The PCBs include build documentation and a BOM that you can access w/o buying.
Effects Layouts

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