My First Stomp Box Project

For my birth­day, I decid­ed to work a com­plete­ly new project: build a gui­tar effects ped­al. I pur­chased the “Con­fi­dence Boost” project kit from BuildYourOwnClone.com (as in clones of pop­u­lar gui­tar stomp box­es). It’s a great project for about $15 which comes with detailed instruc­tions and makes a pret­ty decent lit­tle boost effect. The kit itself only comes with the print­ed cir­cuit board, elec­tron­ic com­po­nents, and off-board wiring such as jacks and potentiometer.

I sol­dered up the com­po­nents and off-board wiring and plugged-it up. And noth­ing. It did­n’t make any sound! I post­ed a cou­ple of pho­tos to the dis­cus­sion board and quick­ly got a response: the input jack was wired back­ward. In oth­er words, the sig­nal from my gui­tar was just going to ground and noth­ing was going on to the effect (or amp). I quick­ly re-worked the input jack and it worked. The tiny poten­tiome­ter (blue screw dri­ver knob in the pho­to above) was a bit tough to use.

I decid­ed it would be fun to go ahead and wire this up as an actu­al stomp box, so I ordered a few more com­po­nents and an enclo­sure. I spent some time paint­ing and fin­ish­ing the enclo­sure. I just used a white pen to draw out the label­ing, but it turned out just fine for this project. I read up on how to wire a footswitch for true bypass (when it’s off, it does­n’t affect the sig­nal at all) and with an LED indi­ca­tor light.

But of course, it only real­ly mat­ters how it sounds. I’m far from a capa­ble gui­tar play­er and even worse when try­ing to film my play­ing, but here’s a small sample.

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A post shared by Jason Cole­man (@super_structure) on Sep 20, 2017 at 11:04am PDT