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Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

(OP)
I'm toying with one of these right now. Completely new to electronics, other than some odd DC12v wiring for my boat.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

Is that a chip? Feh!

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

(OP)
Same chip most commercial digital delays are based on, or so I'm told. Any experience with this stuff Tick?

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

"Is that a chip? Feh!"

Well, in some respects, it's no different than car engines. Hard to find a car that doesn't use electronic ignition with an electronic advance/retard

TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies
[IMG http://tinyurl.com/7ofakss]
Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers


Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
There is a homework forum hosted by engineering.com: http://www.engineering.com/AskForum/aff/32.aspx

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

I see the problem now. Someone swiped all your vacuum tubes.

Chips are for keyboards.

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

(OP)
Ahh, an analog snob.

That's cool. I know plenty of analog snobs, and they're nice people.

If you've got a link to a DIY delay pedal project built off vacuum tubes, please do share it. I'll happily build it and be the king of the hipsters. Then they'll all gather around my fantastic creation, and talk about the latest new rare IPAs nobody's heard of, while drinking PBR. It'll be a hoot.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

beej67: you'd probably be drinking beer beside, or even inside, that delay if you had to make it using vacuum tubes!

I tried to make one of these in my youth. Expensive bucket brigade delay chip. Failed miserably. Never again tried to build something that I didn't understand fully and hence couldn't troubleshoot.

Built a few fuzzboxes using Schmidt triggers. That's all I managed as far as guitar pedals, and if I tried even to build one of those again I'm sure I'd be scratching my head for a long while.

These days you can buy a multieffects pedal including a long looping delay for what, $300? But the rack-mounted units with a 4 to 8 second delay that I used to rent to screw around with were thousands of dollars to buy back in the day. You can blame seeing a Frippertronics concert back in uni for my interest in those, long before "looping" became the standard stage trick used by nearly every solo artist. Fripp had as much delay as he wanted, just by stretching out the distance between his two reel to reels!

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

Never built a pedal. Oughta try.

Actually, I've never been big into effects. Decades of acoustic jamming have refined my chops. I try to get as much nuance as I can out of the instrument itself. When I do play electric, I stick to the basics: EQ and overdrive.

Digital often rings hollow to me. Canned sounds taste like the can they came in.

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

(OP)
That was sorta my point, MM. ;)

The central delay IC for this thing was only $14 I think, and they had a pre-printed and labeled PCB for around $7. It was basically an "any dimwit with a soldering iron can do this" project. Which is good, because we civil engineers are still operating on the Magic Smoke theory of circuits. I think all the parts cost me $40, other than the enclosure.

My theory with this project is this - instead of having a big pedal board with a bunch of different stomp boxes in it, that you can't rearrange without doing it by hand, I want to build one medium sized box with five or six boards in it, and have the ability to jumper them all together in any order I want to on the front of the box with stackable banana plugs. Sort of like a Moog modular synthesizer but for guitar effects. Maybe even build a small mixer into the thing, so that I can build feedback into the system.

My preliminary plan is to put a second delay, a bandpass filter, and a compressor in it. Maybe a phaser.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

Seems to me that it would be even cooler if you had a Bluetooth interface to a row of switches on the guitar itself, and you'd be able to reconfigure on the fly.

TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies
[IMG http://tinyurl.com/7ofakss]
Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers


Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
There is a homework forum hosted by engineering.com: http://www.engineering.com/AskForum/aff/32.aspx

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

For my BSEE senior design project, I designed a 1/3rd octave digital EQ using a Motorola DSP. There was so much processing power left over, I went ahead and added in some digital effects... chorusing, delay, etc.

Cost in parts? About $100 (the custom PCB was the big money, about $150 to a fellow student who had access to the equipment)

Cost in time? Nearly a semester.

Level of awesomeness? 11

Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

(OP)
Yeah, wiring that would be way over my head.

I can pipe the signal through an audio interface into Ableton Live and manipulate any infinite number of effects I want through a midi controller, but there's latency issues. Plus, this idea just seems like something neat to build.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

(OP)
Oh wow MacGyver, post some pics / audio clips of that thing.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

Pffft, that was 20 years ago, give or take. The board has long since met the landfill, and the paper was probably thrown out in one of the last few bookshelf data purges.

If you want to play, though, Motorola has a sweet little DSP dev board... I think it goes for around $50? Maybe $100 these days. All inclusive, programmable via serial or USB. And plenty of app notes to (re)create projects like mine.

I always found Motorola to have some of the best documentation for setting up their processors (at least the DSPs). Their forms are almost fill-in-the-blanks... check off the options you want enabled/disabled, and at the bottom of the sheet the data word you need for register 'X' appears in binary form.

Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

RE: Anybody here build custom guitar pedals?

MacGyver - I built one myself a long time ago (early 90's) using gyrator-based filters rather than DSP. Made a nice job of the metalwork too: made the faceplate on a manual milling machine, sixty-odd slots on a 19" rach panel.

I used to build amps in those days, and repair valve amps for friends who played in bands. I don't think I ever saved much money building my own stuff but I had a lot of fun doing it and learned a lot of skills. Somewhere I have a part-built mixing desk, but the amount of repetition made it both boring and expensive, and the mid-range digital desks were dropping in price so fast that it was possible to get more features for a lot less money than was possible with an old-school analogue design, so it never got completed.

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