Category: pedals

The Jan Ray pedal I built in February 2018 has had a makeover. I’ve been using it a quite a bit lately, and it sounds nice but it looked a bit cheap and cheesy.

So I took it all apart, changed out the DPDT On/On switch, gave it a new lick of paint and put it all back together again.

It’s now the Fay Ray Pedal.

I’m sure it sounds better now. 😉

How do you tame that loud Fender Hot Rod Deluxe amp? By putting a volume control in the loop. So here’s that very thing (with a small cap across the pot to keep the treble).

 

 

It was inspired by Brian Wampler’s video:

I have an ancient MXR Phase 90 from about 1990 or so which has an old style DC jack socket (1/8″). For this reason I’ve been using it with a battery. So, today it was time to whip out the drill (the hole needed widening and, boy, did they use proper metal back then) and the soldering iron and fit a modern 2.1mm centre negative DC jack socket. Success!

Here’s a pic of the guts before I converted it:

 

And after:

The battery leads are disconnected. But I won’t be using a battery in it any more…

Winter Solstice. And time for a King of Tone clone.

This one was definitely more challenging as it consists of two of the same circuit, one for each side. I also designed and added an additional board to mount the clipping diodes and the DIP switches rather than use external switches. I would have liked to have done it all on one vero, but hey ho.

It was a real challenge fitting it all in, but it’s my new fave pedal.

 

I had a little break from building pedals, but here’s a new one. It’s an OCD v3 clone. I actually own an OCD 1.7 but I wanted to compare this one. In the end, it was a bit meh and for some reason is microphonic and squealy when the input jack is not connected. It’s a bit of a ho-humdinger. I could probably fix that somehow at some point.

 

Time for a plain old booster pedal, a clone of the Xotic RC Booster.

The RC Booster offers a super transparent 20db+ clean boost with an adjustable ±15dB two band active EQ which adds a wide range of harmonic content to your ideal sound. As a clean boost, it can enhance other pedals, such as “overdrive and distortion pedals”, or you can crank the gain for a “crunch” sound. But, the RC Booster is an extremely transparent, where many player’s find they leave it on all the time.