The Electric Druid Digital Delay - Another Great Teaching Pedal!

If you're new to electronics, getting started building your own effects pedals can be fairly daunting. Fortunately there are several companies and individuals working to make things a bit more approachable. I'd previously written about building the Anasounds Tremolo pedal, which includes not only decent instructions but online videos which will walk you through the whole process. While it lacks a full video course, Electric Druid's Digidelay project includes some of the best instructions I've ever seen for an effects pedal (or any other electronics project for that matter). Each step is clearly detailed, and in-build power tests are included so you can check reference voltages to ensure the pedal is working long before you even add the pots!

As you can see from the image above, the PCB is very neat, though the fit is a little tight in the enclosure! At the heart of the circuit is the Digital Delay chip itself. Combined with SRAM (memory) chips, you can get up to four seconds of delay - which is fairly neat. This distinguishes the pedal from those based on the PT2399 chip.

Fitting everything inside the enclosure is pretty straightforward, though the potentiometer layout is a little different than what I'm used to. Because I decided to use bezels for the LEDs, they located very close to the potentiometers, so I went ahead and wrapped the lower two pots with heat shrink insulation. The pedal uses two SPST momentary switches - one for bypass, and one for the tap functionality. This is honestly the one area I'm not sure I'm happy with the functionality of the pedal. I'm far more used to standard full bypass pedals with a latching on/off switch. I may go back and re-wire the pedal with a 3PDT for the bypass functionality. The only catch is there isn't a lot of room for one - certainly not one like I'm using on most of my other pedals. I know that there are some low profile 3PDT switches out there, so I may try and pick one of those up to see if I like the functionality a bit better - at least from an ease of use standpoint.

All that being said, the pedal itself works flawlessly, and you can get some seriously long delays - it's almost to the level of a loop in some cases. As this was an "Electric Druid" pedal, I decided to go with something woodsy for the enclosure. I found some decent art online and added text in a couple of Tolkien fonts. I like the end effect, even if I still have some work to do in Illustrator getting some of my font overlays to work better. I'd initially gone with black knobs, but just didn't like the look of them, so I changed all of the controls out to green, which I think pulls the pedal together nicely. They're not the same green as the enclosure, but as you generally don't see the sides, it seems to work.