Pedal...

No, not the bicycle kind. The guitar kind....

I am the kind of person that loves building or improving things. I can almost never leave my cars alone, and prepping our race car is always fun. I have also built a high efficiency bass cabinet to go with my puny David Eden head as well as a sub to augment it.

So needless to say as I continue into the electric guitar realm I had to build my own pedal. I guess the word build may be a little stong here. Assemble is probably a better choice. I bought a kit from generalguitargadgets.com and started assembly yesterday.

The kit I got was the Marshall blues breaker. I chose it because I wanted a simple circuit to start with and I can always use another overdrive tone. It is a reproduction of the original pedal plus the added benefit of true bypass switching. The kit comes with everything you need except tools. The schematics and layout are on the web. I actually soldered everything up, put it together and it worked on the first try! I was not expecting that.

One of these days I'll pull it back apart and paint the enclosure, but before that I am already planning a few little modifications for it. The cool thing about researching and assembling the pedal yourself is that in the process you learn a little bit about what is really going on in that circuit. So if you hear something you don't like you can work at fixing that instead of just heading for a new pedal.

I'm sure this won't be my last pedal, it was a blast! My goal is to work on more and more difficult pedals and ultimately build my own small tube amp. So if anyone is up for having a pedal built, let me know. I'll work for chinese sweat shop wages....