Saturday, November 2, 2024

A Two for One Overdrive Pedal!

The JHS pedals SuperBolt has long been a staple of many pedalboards as it's a really decent overdrive pedal. A while back, however, JHS released the limited edition "TacoBolt" - a different take on the SuperBolt. It was more of a gated fuzz than a overdrive / distortion in a lot of ways. It was allegedly discovered when a normal SuperBolt had been mis-biased. TacoBolts at this point start at about $275 on Reverb, while SuperBolts are typically cheaper. I'd gotten a request for a TacoBolt from a friend, so I went in search of a good board.


Saturday, October 26, 2024

Updating the Miragaia

A couple of years ago, Steggo released an awesome doom fuzz clone using the PedalPCB Arkaim Fuzz board. The build actually ended up being surprisingly popular, and I've even built a custom version in a totally unique enclosure. That new enclosure came out so well, I decided it was time to go back and re-visit the original Miragaia enclosure, as Tayda had expanded the range of enclosure finishes available since I'd done the original design.


Monday, October 14, 2024

A Slightly Different Archaeopteryx Fuzz

Last month I finished up a fairly old school version of the Octavia fuzz pedal with a ton of ceramic capacitors, etc. I'd intended to build about three of these, but ran out of some of the more vintage bits to actually go full ceramic for all of the capacitors. Since I'd already populated the resistors for the third pedal, I decided to substitute some of the same red metallized film capacitors like I use in a lot of my Klon builds for the ceramics.


Friday, September 27, 2024

A Different Blues Driver Mod!

I've previously built a few versions of the Galaxie mod of the Boss Blues Drive BD-2 pedal. The most common of which is the version I'd sold as a part of Steggo's ongoing support of Ukraine's defense. There are other versions of the circuit out there, and I'd at one point (in the sadly far too distant past) gotten a request for the Keeley modded version of the pedal. A quick search of the internet showed that one of my favorite sources of all information pedal, the Tone Geek, had a write-up detailing his version of the Keeley mod (as it was used by John Mayer). I thought this was a great start, but decided to see if I could take things just one or two steps further. So here's Steggo's take on the Tone Geek's take on the Keeley mod of the Blues Driver. 


Saturday, September 21, 2024

A New Dimetrodon Distortion Variant in an Amazing Enclosure!

The Dimetrodon Distortion was Steggo Studios first original pedal design. Like most analog guitar pedals these days, it has DNA that can be traced back to earlier designs, but it fills a niche that none of the designs it is based on don't - at least for the tones I've been after. Last year I'd given away a prototype version of the pedal when my Instagram channel hit 1000 followers. It is getting close to 1500 now, so I decided it was time for another giveaway, but this time with a few twists!


Monday, September 2, 2024

Another Awesome Vintage Fuzz - Steggo's Take on the Octavia!

I didn't plan this on purpose, it just happened to be when the various projects got done. A couple of weeks ago I finally finished up my first Fuzz Face builds, and today I've just finished up another amazing vintage fuzz - the Octavia. This is another fuzz effect made famous by the legendary Jimi Hendrix. Originally designed by his sound engineer Roger Mayer, the pedal blends an octave up signal with a distorted signal to create one of the first (if not the first) octave-up fuzz effects.


Saturday, August 24, 2024

An Alternate Brachyceratops Overdrive

A little over a month ago I posted a new combo pedal build I'd gotten a request for - a combo I likely should have done long ago - a Klon plus a Bluesbreaker circuit. I sort of went all out on that original build as I used one of the amazing Tone Geek Mini-Taur boards and paired it with a brand new in-house layout of the Bluesbreaker that provides early and late tone options along with clipping options. It came out really well, and included an order reverse switch. However, I wanted to do a version using the same technique I had used on my BMP / power-boost combo pedal. In that version, there are four jacks - you can't reverse the order on the fly - that has to be done with patch cables, but you can use the pedals independently or include some sort of effects loop between them.