Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Building Pedals


In my search for the perfect guitar rig I've decided to build my own gear. Here's my first attempt at a tube overdrive pedal based on a circuit called the Valvecaster, it incorporates a 386-chip-based boost circuit to get a nice overdriven sound. This is called the "fire hazard" because, well, I wouldn't leave it plugged in unattended...
You can hear my playing through the Fire Hazard pedal in this jam session from a few weeks ago. In this jam you can hear two guitars. Mine is the sort of obnoxious heavy shredding style and the second guitar is the inimitable avant-garde style of the one and only Eric Maurer. I'm also playing around with my wah quite a bit. Jamie Williams is on drums, and Sheldon Chow is on bass.

My second pedal is pure tube, using two tubes (valves). I went for a more crunchy distortion this time. I really like this pedal a lot although I'm not too happy with this demo recording I made the other day. I started calling it blinky because it has 3 knobs that remind me of the 3-eyed fish from the Simpsons. Here's a sample: http://homepage.mac.com/dshimmyo/musicForBlog/blinky01Test.mp3