Amp Channel Footswitch

Most amps have the abil­i­ty to use an exter­nal footswitch to change between a clean and dis­tor­tion chan­nel. Of course, some have more sophis­ti­cat­ed options than this, but the chan­nel switch is a pret­ty com­mon fea­ture. My old­er broth­er recent­ly got an awe­some-look­ing, orange Fend­er Duo-Son­ic and a small Fend­er prac­tice amp to play it through. This lit­tle Mus­tang amp has a lot of pre­sets and he can use a footswitch to select between a pair of them. Of course, it being an afford­able prac­tice amp, the footswitch is sold separately. 

But a footswitch is a pret­ty easy thing to make your­self. In my case, I had the dou­ble pole sin­gle throw (DPST) footswitch tak­en out of my Dun­lop Wah ped­al when I mod­ded it (post to come some­day!) and an old stereo audio jack. That, a bit of wire, and some­thing to put it in is all you need! In fact, the fact that it was a dou­ble pole switch and a stereo jack made them both overkill for this small project! But why not recy­cle the parts for a good cause?

I pur­chased a pow­der-coat­ed 1590LB enclo­sure from Mam­moth Elec­tron­ics. At 2″ by 2″ by 1″ tall, this is about as small an enclo­sure as you can get, but plen­ty big for a small switch and a jack. I got the orange to match his gui­tar (well, as close as I can get with stock pow­der coat col­ors, any­way). I laid out the switch and jack to ensure I could arrange them how I want­ed; though I could have also just had the jack on the “side” of the enclo­sure. The cir­cuit sol­der­ing here is super-sim­ple: just sol­der the “tip” lug of the jack to the cen­ter lug of one of the poles (three of the lugs in a line make a pole). Then sol­der the “sleeve” lug of the jack to either the left or right lug on the same poll of the switch. That’s it! Did you mess up and wire the sleeve to the cen­ter lug on the switch? It’s still fine! All this does is con­nect the tip to the sleeve when the switch is “on” and then breaks the cir­cuit between the two when it’s off.

Now, this par­tic­u­lar build relies on an instru­ment cable to con­nect the footswitch to your amp. But you don’t have to use a shield­ed cable for this as the gui­tar sig­nal itself isn’t pass­ing through that cable; just a rel­a­tive­ly low volt­age (around 4–5v1) is flow­ing through to tell the amp the gain chan­nel should be on. So you could actu­al­ly skip the jack and just use any old wire (speak­er cable, a lamp cord, etc.) and wire that into a 1/4″ audio cable end. I was just using as many spare parts as I could. In fact, I fin­ished the bot­tom by cut­ting up a kitchen jar grip pad and glu­ing it to the bot­tom with spray adhe­sive (it won’t slide on his hard­wood floor!).

Giv­en that the Fend­er sin­gle footswitch costs around $15, this prob­a­bly is not much of a cheap­er alter­na­tive. But it was a fun gift for my broth­er and if you’re inter­est­ed in prac­tic­ing some sol­der­ing, this is a great and prac­ti­cal project to start with!

So, amaz­ing­ly enough, there’s a video in which YouTube chan­nel Mer­win­Mu­sic makes the exact same footswitch as mine — down to the orange col­or! Check it out! He also does a great job of explain­ing how to test out that this sort of switch works with your amp before you go to the trou­ble of build­ing one, which is a good idea as some amps may vary (but all good amps just copy Leo’s original!).

1. The volt­age is low enough that my Black­star head­’s footswitch does­n’t even have a resis­tor on the LED. [↩]