A David Gilmour Inspired Strat - Redux

A little over two years ago I put together a parts-caster using the EMG DG20 pickup set. This set of pickups was used by David Gilmour starting in around 1985 at the Live Aid concert. He'd continue to use the active pickups through about 2005 when he would return to the Black Strat and it's traditional single coils. When I first got the EMG DG20 together, it sounded good - by itself. Unfortunately most of the Gilmour sounds and pedals I'm trying to emulate are from the earlier albums, and the active pickups didn't stack well with my amplifiers and effects pedals. So given I have many guitars and this one wasn't being played - I had two options. I could try and sell it (the market for parts-casters as a unit is not good), or I could pull out the active pickups and re-wire it with single coils. After some unsuccessful attempts at the former, I settled on the latter, and I'm very happy I did!

The Dark Side of the Steggo??? A New Gilmour Inspired Combo Pedal!

 Combination pedals are a great way to get multiple amazing circuits in one box. I've built a few pedals that are either physical combinations of two separate PCB's, or clones of pedals that involved multiple PCBs in the past. However, all of these combinations were essentially clones of existing pedals that were combination pedals in their own right, including the Steggo versions of the Cheese Source, Hoof Reaper, and Heavy Water. However, I wanted to do something that was a combo of two different pedals to help create a specific sound, so I went back to the pedal board of one of my favorite guitarists, David Gilmour, for inspiration.

It's BMP Time Again!!! A '73 Gilmour Ram's Head Build for Steggo's Personal Board

I've definitely built more Big Muff Pi pedals than any other type, and in more variants. The circuit goes together well, and with all of the modifications over the years, there are a ton of options that can make subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) differences in the sound of the effect. Last November I finally came up with a suitably "Steggo" name for the venerable BMP, the Big Muttaburrasaurus Phi, or the "Big Mutt Phi" if you prefer. The enclosures I'd used were a modified version of an earlier take of roughly the same art that I'd intended on using with the AionFX Halo PCB that I've used on many successful builds. Since I had one of the enclosures for the Halo PCB available, I decided to go ahead and use it for a personal build - with only a few ulterior motives.

Colorsound Overdriver - Vintage Boost!

The Colorsound Overdriver is an early boost pedal from 1972 that quickly found its way into the hands of guitarists like David Gilmour and Jeff Beck. I'm a big Gilmour fan (just in case my recent DG20 Strat build didn't make that abundantly clear!), and really wanted to add this particular pedal to my board. These gems appear to be out of production at this point, and even later versions from the 1990s appear to be going for $500+ on Reverb, so this pedal is an ideal candidate for cloning. AionFX has a PCB for this particular pedal marketed as the Plasma. There is a modern version which just builds the Overdriver, and a Legacy version which will do the related Power Booster circuit as well. For this build I went with the more recent incarnation of the board and decided to do the Power Booster as its own build later.

EMG DG20 Partscaster Build

Fender electric guitars - especially the Stratocaster and Telecaster - by virtue of their construction lend themselves easily to modification. The necks bolt on, and in many cases the pickups are housed within the pickguard itself - so any modifications required fit a new pickup or even a totally new style of pickup don't require the skills of a high-end luthier. This fact quickly led to the birth of the "partscaster" - any Fender guitar that has had parts swapped, or even guitars built from parts from the outset. 

Prior to this build, I owned one Stratocaster - an overall black one with cream pickups - and yes it looks a lot like "The" Black Strat. As I'm (obviously) a David Gilmour fan, I also wanted to have a strat with the EMG active pickup set he started using in the mid-1980s. That being said, my existing strat is a special edition, and I kind of want to keep it stock. I therefore started looking for a way to build my own "partscaster" centered around the EMG DG20 electronics.

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!