DISTORTION GUITAR PEDAL
As a guitar player I've always wanted to be able to make my own effects pedals, and now through my studies, I can! Here I'm following the Boss DS-1 design from the analysis done by electrosmash (website no longer available, but an archive can be found here )
Schematic
Here is the reference schematic from Electrosmash. There were a few things I decided to omit out of personal preference; the beauty of building your own stuff! I didn't care much for the adjustable lowpass filter in the tone level section, since my guitar amplifier has pretty decent EQ capability. I also was short on potentiometers and wanted to save them for other projects.
Breadboarding
Here's the circuit done up on a bread board. Thankfully the design doesn't require any odd parts, just the standard resistors, transistors, op-amps, diodes, etc.
The enclosure the breaboard is sitting in is the cardboard box my Kobo e-reader came in, with holes cut in the front so that I could mount quarter inch jacks on it for input and output. Also, the potentiometers are quite chunky because I got them from a surplus store in town.. They were covered in some kind of grease when I bought them- I wonder where they were harvested from.
Sound test!
Don't judge my playing- I was just doing some random riffs in excitement that it worked properly!
I really enjoy the subtle distortion it adds with the values I decided for the potentiometers. The original design calls for a much larger potentiometer which would cause more gain in the feedback loop, but I prefer a softer sound so I picked a 10k potentiometer.
Soldered version in enclosure to come!
I've soldered the pedal design onto perfboard, but when mounting in my enclosure, I broke one of the wires which made the tone sound extremely muffled. I'm currently putting off fixing it out of time constraint with school, but eventually I will polish this project and post an update.