To start, I should tell you that I've been working on electronics since I was in High School. I worked for a company in San Diego as an electronics technician - soldering, testing, and calibrating equipment - for two years before I went to college. In 2006, I got a degree from USC in Electrical Engineering, and worked for Blue Microphones as an assembly, test, and repair technician. More soldering, and also a lot of work getting little pieces to all fit together. When I moved on to my current position (as a systems engineer, where I don't get to solder or work with hardware), I started to miss working with real parts to make real stuff. I started making my own XLR and 1/4" cables, but got bored with that real quick. That's where these stompboxes come in.
A few months ago, the guitarist in my band left his amp in my car. My wife didn't want the amp in the car she had to drive one day, so I brought it inside. I noticed that both of the input jacks on his Fender Blues DeVille reissue were in bad shape. I thought to myself "hmm, I wonder if I could fix those," so I went online, did some quick research and realized that it was as easy as removing the old jacks and soldering in some new ones. And the best thing was, I loved doing it.
A few weeks later I was in a quandry about how to connect two sustain pedals (latching and non-latching models) to my one keyboard, and I decided to sketch out a way to have them both plugged into a box (much like a DI), and have an output from the box to my keyboard so that they could both simultaneously control the sustain. I figured it out, and wired it up with parts from RadioShack and it worked!
After that triumph, I began wondering what else I could create in a DI type box, and wandered into the world of Do It Yourself (DIY) guitar effects. I found a couple great websites (ex. http://www.tonepad.com/) that have awesome layouts and schematics, and found some great places to order parts from, and decided to give these pedals a try. And the rest is history :-D
Currently, I have made Seven different pedals from four different categories:
Compression
Distortion
Tremolo
**NEW**Crybaby Wah Mods
They all work (and sound) better than I ever expected them to. Please check out each of them at their individual blogs.
And thanks for stopping by.
(All Trademarks remain the property of their owners. No trademark referenced here implies a connection between this site and their owners.)
No comments:
Post a Comment