Updated Pi - Repainting a Friend's Pedal!

Back in September I posted a couple of versions of the Big Muff Pi I'd build using Aion FX's Halo board. One was done in silver with a Pink Floyd inspired font and recreated the circuit of the '73 Gilmour Ram's Head version of the pedal. The other one was done in Russian 4BO green and recreated the Red Army / Civil War circuit. A friend asked me to make up a second Russian style enclosure, so I did and sent it to him. Unfortunately there appears to have been an issue with my primer, as the paint started to flake on arrival which sort of ruined the effect. So he sent it back to me for a redo, and as long as we were doing it again, he wanted a bit of a variation on the theme...

Invoking the Spirit of EVH - the Wolfgang 5051

Despite passing away a little over a year ago, Eddie Van Halen remains one of the most influential rock guitarists of all time. I was a huge Van Halen fan in my youth, and one of my first concerts was their 5150 tour (the first with Sammy Hagar as lead singer). As is common with many prominent musicians, Eddie worked with various companies to develop his own lines of gear including guitars and amplifiers. Starting in 1993, Eddie worked with Peavey to develop the 5150 series which was produced until 2004. He then moved to working with Fender on the EVH line of amplifiers which were first released in 2007. This particular build creates essentially a preamp effect based on the Peavey circuit which can be used either as a pedal directly or in an effects loop - though with the sheer output it seems far better suited to the latter!

Gibson SG with P-90 Tribute Custom Build

Here's a little project I've been working on in the background for quite some time. With all of the pedals I'd built, I'd also seen a lot of people picking up guitar kits and building them. There are even a couple of Facebook groups devoted to the topic. It looked like a lot of fun, and I (obviously) love to build things, so I figured I'd give it a go. I wanted to build something that I didn't already have, and ideally something I couldn't just go buy at the same or lower price point. I'd been looking at the Gibson SG with P90s, but they're not cheap (you're looking at $1500 for starters - probably at least $2K set up like I wanted), and while the finishes were beautiful, I already had red and black guitars. I really liked the idea of a transparent green SG rather than the transparent red - so I figured I'd try and build my own!  

... but do you have it in green???

A Tale of Two Mini-Taurs - Klon Clones in a Convenient Travel Size

As much fun as I had building my first functional Klon Centaur clone, it has one major drawback - it's bleedin' huge! Don't get me wrong, I really love the aesthetics of the enclosure - especially with the very tongue-in-cheek theme on that particular one - but it isn't the most practical pedal to be carting about unless you're going with a very limited board as it takes up the space of at least two 125B-sized pedals - if not a bit more. Shortly after releasing the BFK full-sized board, The Tone Geek released the "Mini-taur" - a faithful 1:1 signal recreation of the original Klon Centaur suitable for use with a 125B enclosure. I'd had so much fun building the full-sized pedal, I decided to not only take the plunge with the "mini," but use the opportunity to build one for a friend as well.

Aion's Blueshift - Cloning the Insanely Complex Dimension DC-2

The Boss DC-2 Dimension C chorus pedal was originally released in 1985 and remains one of the more popular chorus effect pedals. While it technically only has four main settings, the electronics behind the pedal are insanely complex (more on that in a bit). The original Boss version is long out of production, with excellent condition examples running north of $500 on reverb. That being said, you can get the Waza Craft re-release model new for just a little north of $250. Building your own version is a bit cheaper, but it is a huge challenge. I picked up the Aion FX version of this pedal, the Blueshift, which is an absolute beast of a build. It comes as two separate PCBs, and then gets progressively crazier from there!

Death by Reverb - Creating Fun Echo Effects!

Many guitar amplifiers include a built-in reverb setting. Since the 1960s it is one of the most common effects added to electric guitar. These days most reverb is added digitally, but there are some true analog versions out there including Anasounds' spring reverb system (which looks and sounds exceedingly cool!). Most amplifier effects are essentially one knob which adds progressively more reverb creating essentially a larger echo chamber for the sound, but there are other ways to manipulate reverberation digitally to create the illusion of playing in anything from a cave to a large room or even hyperspace if you want to get fairly crazy. Death by Audio's Reverberation Machine is billed as a "synthetic atmosphere creator." Guitar PCB Mania has a version of this circuit called the Death by Reverb which relies on a Belton reverb module for part of the build. It appears to be an "inspired by" rather than an absolute copy, but the controls are fairly similar.

Updating the Electric Mistress - No Send / Receive Loop Mod

Last week I posted an entry detailing my EHX Electric Mistress build based on the PCB Guitar Mania Electric Lover PCB. Overall I was pretty happy with the build, but I had noticed something a little unusual when I began the calibration process. In my first entry I mentioned having to crank the bias trimmer quite a bit to get a good tone (or any tone at all for that matter). On the PCB Guitar Mania Facebook group, another user posted that he was having a similar issue with his build, although his was apparently bad enough to where he couldn't get a reasonable calibration. Fortunately the long-time board users had a fix for him, and since I'd had a similar issue in my base-build, I decided to take a deep breath, pull the PCB out of the enclosure and try the fix on mine as well. 

A Doppelganger Doppelgänger - Building Aion FX's Quadratron

The Lovetone Doppelganger is a four stage optical phaser pedal with a huge number of tone options. Once again, this is currently a very expensive pedal, with examples going on Reverb north of $1000. However, Aion FX offers a version which you can build for a fraction of the cost of the original, though it is a challenging build! As you can see below, the PCB itself is vary large, though it isn't packed as tightly as some other manufacturers' offerings are. As this is a fairly complex build, I'm actually going to go through the process step by step rather than glossing over some of the more gory details.

The Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress Flanger / Chorus

I'll be completely honest, I'm not a great guitar player at this point. I'm somewhere in the "intermediate" range, but I'm having a huge amount of fun learning not only guitar technique but chasing great sounds. One of the songs I've always loved is Rush's "Natural Science," and the flange effects at the beginning of it really do a lot to set the tone and mood of the piece. While no one seems to have a definitive answer (apart from Alex Lifeson, who apparently hasn't discussed / disclosed what hardware was used), the consensus is that he used an EHX Electric Mistress on the album Permanent Waves - especially on "The Spirit of Radio" (another song I need to learn...). As I'm on a massive pedal-building kick, and given one of my other guitar heroes David Gilmour also used one, I decided to build my own EHX Electric Mistress using PCB Guitar Mania's Electric Lover Flanger PCB. 

Dinosaural Tube Bender Clone - the Wyvern!

So this build is a clone of another rare beast, the Dinosaural Tube Bender. I've honestly never seen one for sale, but it does have an interesting history. Designed by Dan Coggins and originally published as a DIY project in the UK version of Guitar Magazine, Dan made additional tweaks to the design and released it under his Dinosaural brand, with only about 140 being produced in the original run from 2003-2007 (with an additional 12 being built from original components in 2016). Aion FX traced one of the production models and has released it as the Wyvern. 

Well Rats - A Pro Co Rat Clone!

Introduced in 1978, the Pro Co Rat distortion pedal became a staple of 1980s hard rock and heavy metal music. While still in production, the Rat has gone through several iterations, though the basic circuit really hasn't changed much. One of the first pedals I picked up was a new production Pro Co Rat pedal, but Aion FX has a version under the name "Helios" which not only adds some additional functionality, but uses a standard 125B enclosure making laying out the increasingly precious geography on my pedal board a bit easier!

How Much Fuzz is Too Much Fuzz??? The World May Never Know...

Apologies for my enforced absence for the past few days. I'd just built a new computer and had encountered all sorts of issues with it from BIOS to drivers. Fortunately there weren't any hardware issues, but the BIOS issues involved getting a local shop to help sort them out. In the interim I've been busily working away on a few new pedals with a few new techniques I'd picked up on the DIY Stompboxes Unoffical page on Facebook. The first I'll feature here is the Aion Phobos, which is a version of the Tone Bender Mark III from 1967-8. It's a very early fuzz pedal with three germanium transistors and a built-in voltage inverter that maintains the positive (effective) ground of the original while using a standard center negative power supply.

Live Long, and Fuzz - The Vulcan Octave Fuzz

Aion's Vulcan is a recreation of the fOXX Tone Machine initially released in 1971. This is a fairly thick fuzz pedal that appears to have gone through a couple of iterations before it was discontinued in 1978. Aion FX provides documentation and specs for two versions both using 2N3565 transistors. The early version uses transistors with hFE in the 230-250 range while the late version uses transistors with an hFE of over 450. I'd initially intended to build the late version, but when all of my 2N3565s sorted low, I ended up going with an early build.

Pi All Around - Two Unique Versions of an Ubiquitous Pedal!

The Big Muff Pi, originally designed by Mike Matthews and released by his company Electro-Harmonix in 1969, is one of the most ubiquitous pedals ever produced. Combining elements of both distortion and fuzz with variable sustain, the Big Muff has been produced in a dizzying array of varieties over the years. Many of the variants were a result of EHX simply changing the value of the components willy-nilly during the production run. When Electro-Harmonix went out of business in 1982, clones and copies exploded on the scene, and Mike Matthews would re-open shop in the USSR under the Sovtek brand name and begin re-issuing his designs in the early 1990s. Matthews would bring production back to the US in 2000, and numerous new editions of the pedal have been released since then. If you're interested in the history of this great pedal, there are several great references, but one of the best is Kit Rae's page. 

Aion FX offers the Halo, which is their trace of the Big Muff. The only change is a mid-range switch that provides three mid-tone options: stock, flat, and boosted. Otherwise the circuit is a completely faithful tracing of the original. A spreadsheet of 18 different versions is included so you can target any variant with your build - or play around and develop your own recipe. At this point I've built two versions which are included in this entry, a Ram's Head '73 Gilmour and a Civil War / Red Army version. Depending on what transistors I'm able to find, I may go back and build other variants as well, as these are a lot of fun!

A Pair of Wooly Fuzz Pedals

Fuzz pedals are one of the more popular builds in the DIY community because of the variety of options, both vintage and modern, out there. Fuzz and Distortion sounds formed the foundation of rock and blues music in the 50s, 60s, and 70s with the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone commonly thought to be the first available effects pedal being released in 1962. For these two builds, I used the Aion FX Calliope board which replicates the Catalinbread Karma Suture - which in of itself is an adaptation of the earlier Interfax Harmonic Percolator. The Karma Suture is a fairly modern pedal first released as a germanium transistor based version in 2014. A silicon version followed in 2016. They're not terribly expensive or rare, but they are a great simple build which will let you get a pedal for a fraction of the cost of an original.

One Klone to Rule them All

The Klon Centaur - one of the most sought after overdrive pedals. Originally built by Bill Finnegan from 1994-2008, he was never able to keep up with demand and prices quickly rose. With only about 8000 produced it is an exceedingly rare beast, and prices for originals currently range from about $5000 to $7500. Because of its price and popularity, a number of clones of the original have sprung up - arguably more than just about any other pedal out there. Available pedals cover the full range range from faithful copies to cheap Chinese rip-offs with modifications, improvements, and variations of every stripe in between. 

In the interest of full disclosure, the first guitar pedal I tried to build was the Ceriatone Centura - a near exact copy of the original Klon Centaur, right down to the enclosure and knobs. That build wasn't entirely successful, and to be honest, I'm still debugging it. Fast forward a few months and The Tone Geek has released his BFK, a signal copy of the original Klon Centaur using a more modern 2-layer PCB with thicker traces and better grounding. It would also fit in the original style enclosure, and as I happened to have a spare Centura enclosure with a damaged paint job, I repainted it for this new build.

Dinosaural Compressor OTC-201 Clone - With a Real Dino!

So this was another really fun build that may now be usurping some of my other compressor pedals as my favorite - at least for my single-coil guitars. That being said, my stock MXR Dyna Comp is still fairly amazing when I pull out my Les Paul. This build recreates a rare, though not ridiculously expensive ($300-$400-ish), compressor pedal - the Dinosaural OTC-201. Aion FX sells this as the Convex in both PCB and kit forms. I went ahead and picked mine up as a PCB as I wanted to hand pick some of the components and get as close to the original as possible.

Fresh Compressed Orange Juice?

This build is a clone of the Orange Squeezer compression circuit by Guitar PCB called the "Julius". I picked up the PCB for this project because it's pretty much the sound Mark Knopfler uses on "Sultans of Swing" - which I need a lot more practice before I'm competent at! This build itself is pretty straightforward with very few parts. Guitar PCB is a smaller outfit, so you get a parts list and some decent instructions, but unlike Aion FX there isn't a pre-populated shopping list with part numbers for Mouser or Tayda. I just added additional parts to an order I was making to cover the components needed for this build.

What's the Vector, Victor?

So here is my first "twin" build (well - sort of - we'll get to that later). I've been building several pedals lately (obviously) and I have a colleague who is also a guitarist looking for a delay pedal. Since I had the Aion Vector on my "to do" list, I didn't figure it would be too much more trouble to just build two at the same time, and for the most part that held true. It was sort of nice to be able to double check the placement of all of the components as I went through and make sure I didn't accidentally goof something up. The Vector is based on the Mad Professor Deep Blue Delay and the PT2399 delay chip. It is a digital delay, but one that many analog purists will at least tolerate. Unlike many of the pedals I've worked on, this one isn't ridiculously expensive, but it is still cheaper to build (~$40-50) than buy ($170-$200 used on reverb).

Put a Bird on It - Aion FX Cerulean

So here's another one that I'd gotten the PCB populated a few weeks ago, but just managed to finally finish up the enclosure - the Aion FX Cerulean based on the Marshall Bluesbreaker. While you can get a Marshall Bluesbreaker II pedal for a quite reasonable price, original Bluesbreakers seem to start around $600 these days. The Bluesbreaker is an amp-overdrive style pedal designed to reproduce the tone of the amplifier of the same name from the 1960s. The basic circuit was used as the basis for the King of Tone (which I have previously posted an entry on). Aion FX took a couple of cues from the King of Tone and also provided an option to incorporate functionality from the JHS Morning Glory V3 (which I didn't actually incorporate into my build). The documentation for the Cerulean implies that at some point a King of Tone version may be offered in the future as certain board components are left unpopulated.

Long Live the King (of Tone)!

Here's a recent project that I had a minor initial issue with, but is quickly turning in to one of my favorite pedals. This is The Knight of Tone from PCB Guitar Mania. The board is based on the King of Tone, another boutique pedal that is extremely popular. As with most out of production boutique pedals (edit - turns out it is still in production, but with a 3 year waiting list - yikes!), this one is now fairly expensive - in the $700 to $800 range for originals. Rather than sourcing my own parts, I ended up picking up the full kit from Das Musikding. You can get it with or without an enclosure, and the enclosure can be drilled or not. I went ahead and picked up a drilled enclosure and the whole thing cost me €55 - or about $65 at today's exchange rate. Not a bad savings!

How Many Parsecs?

So my latest project is something a little different - the Aion Parsec. The Parsec is based on the Systec Harmonic Energizer from the mid-70s. It's a nifty little filter/equalizer pedal that lets you get some really interesting tones if you want to mess around with it. It will take your guitar tone anywhere from very growly bass to fairly tinny treble. You can also do some basic boost with it if you play around with it. This is another one of those long out-of-production pedals that the "real thing" will cost you north of $1000 (I recently saw one on ebay for $1495), but building your own is far cheaper, and a heck of a lot of fun!

Aion Oceanid - Cornish OC-1 Optical Compressor Adaptation

Here's a project I literally finished up last night. Granted, the PCB had been populated a couple of weeks ago, but it took me a while to get the enclosure to a point where I was happy with it. The Aion Oceanid is quite a bit more complex than Acapulco I detailed in my previous blog entry, and is an adaptation of the Cornish OC-1. This brings me to one of the major benefits of building your own guitar effects pedals. The cheapest I've seen a Cornish OC-1 for sale is about $750. Some Cornish pedals blast through the $1000 mark. The Aion PCB will cost you $12, and the rest of the components (assuming you get good quality ones) should run you $50-$60, meaning you get a boutique pedal for an order of magnitude less cost - assuming you're willing to put the time in to build it.

An Easy One - The Acapulco Overdrive Kit

So I figured I'd start out the blog with a simple one, the Acapulco Overdrive kit from Das Musikding based on the Acapulco Gold from EarthQuaker Devices. I included links in case you want to go searching for this and forget to include "guitar pedal" in your Google search (insert winky face emoji here). In the interest of full disclosure, this is not the first pedal I built, or even built successfully, but it is an awesome little afternoon project!

Welcome to Steggo Studio Productions!

Welcome to my new blog covering one of my more recent interests - all things guitar. I've played music in one form or another for as long as I can remember, but guitar was never an instrument I'd picked up - well until COVID hit. With a lot of extra time at the house, I decided to take the plunge and pick up the electric guitar, and with the electric guitar suddenly comes "The Quest for Tone"! The dizzying array of tone and effects pedals available, and the prohibitive cost of many of the more unique ones, has led me down another rabbit hole - building my own effects pedals!