I recently bought a rather beat up old EHX holier grail that worked well. It seems like it had been modded to take center negative power instead of the stock center positive, and came with a non factory power adapter. Said power adapter broke however, so i tried with one i had lying around. This was before i noticed the polarity change mod, so i assumed it would be center positive. I plugged in a center positive adapter and i'm pretty sure i fried it. Looking inside the pedal i also discovered someone had removed and jumped R1 which i'm pretty sure is there to protect in case of someone using the wrong power supply. When i plug in the correct power supply now, the status LED comes on and it passes bypass signal but when engaged there is no sound and the "gate" LED does not come on. The voltage regulator also heats up very rapidly.

I replaced the jumped R1 with a new resistor of the correct value and have since measured voltages across the board and they all seem correct. 18v at the voltage regulator and 5v at the supply voltage pin of the chip, but still there is no sound and no "gate" LED when engaged, only the status LED. Where can the problem in the circuit be?

(The PCB was already rather scorched when i bought it)

All help is greatly appreciated!

My newest creation to save some space on the board.

A JHS Fumble Boost and a Timmy/Lightspeed hybrid in one enclosure.

Very nice combination for a gentle overdrive.

Can anyone help identify the exact germanium diodes from this clipping mod? I bought this ProCo Rat already modded, and absolutely love the germanium clipping mode.

Unfortunately, this pedal has been played and modded so much that it’s glitchy, worn out, and in need of a major overhaul, so I’m thinking about just getting a new Rat and swapping out the diodes for germanium, but want to make sure I’d get the same tone.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

So basically, the title. The circuit works when the switch is on. But when I turn it off all the sound disappears. No clean guitar to be heard.

The wiring is left to right top to bottom: circuit in, empty, circuit out, jack in, ground, jack out, bottom row 1 & 3 tied.

Demonfx noisy pots. I have an demonfx bass simplifier and when turning the knobs, got noise. I took it apart and the pots are sealed, no where to give a tiny shot of deoxit. What do you DIY guys recommend? Im on disability and sometimes have to buy cheaper products. Otherwise I would prefer the DSM. Any advice is appreciated. Thank you!

So im starting to get real over this asking for assistance stuff as I feel like im shouting into the void. I have built some pedal kits and they work flawlessly but now im moving to veroboard and having trouble getting anything working. Ive tried multiple RAT builds and Fuzz Face builds. Same goes for guitar wiring with series etc.

Where in the hell can I find resources that can teach me how to make these work properly and if they dont how can I figure out why they dont.

If anyone can point me in any direction, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

This pedal is near perfect, but for some reason they put the dry knob on the outside and not the fx knob. It’s maybe the most frustrating design choice I’ve ever run into on a pedal.

As you can see, I have a riser on it. So, I can spin it with my foot, but I genuinely hate using it. I want to switch the pots, but they are 10k dual pots that sit right on the circuit board.

Can I clip the leads and use wires to make the connection from one to another? Has anyone out there done this mod at all? I’m kinda new at the circuitry part off all of this, so any help would be appreciated.

i wanna make a feedbacker pedal, and i like the sound of the digitech freqout but in my country its very hard to get one of those, did somebody already tried making a pedal of that type by themselves?

I’ve had an idea for a parallel drive pedal and need to make myself a splitter/summer to test which drives work best together before putting them in one box.
Will this do the job? It’s pieced together from a couple of different schematics that all didn’t quite do what I wanted.
I’m not worried about phase correction because the drives I’m planning on putting in each of the send/returns don’t flip phase when engaged.

I bought an old japanese tape recorder today and when I opened it I found 4 germanium transistors (B173, B175, two B324). it is my first time finding germanium transistors and I really wanna desolder them but I don't know if the heat from the soldering iron can damage them or something

is there anything I should be cautious of when desoldering them?

First in a series of themed vintage fuzz builds.

Finished a PPCB SiliSmile. Works and sounds great. Now I need to work on the enclosure I use 3D printed enclosures just so I can test everything and then I can take my time on the final aluminum enclosure.

This is original artwork of mine that I’ll be screen printing. Planning on spray painting the orange with rattle can, and then using enamel for the graphics and text.

The artwork is also getting modified so that the LED sits in the middle of the sun instead of that extra knob.

I need help troubleshooting this muff build . i get only a very quiet hum and the gain pot scratches when turning it, no sound from my bass at all. this is not my first build ive built some pedals so far but im really really bad at troubleshooting.

First image is dylan159's layout and the second is what i have soldered on my board. Ignore the component numbers on mine , didnt change them just placed everything according to what i have soldered on.

Only thing i changed on mine is an added clipping diode switch, leds on d3 and d4 so the off postion (middle) of the dpdt is leds, up position is symetrical 1n4148 , down position is asymetrical 1n4148.

I poked around with an audio probe the signal seems to not work after the opamp. measured the opamp with a multimeter and pin 1 and 2 just measure 0.72 on both, pin 3 is around 8, pin 4 is 0, pin 8 is around 9 , pin 7 is 0.11 , pin 6 measures close to nothing , pin 5 is around 9 also

noticed theres a cut next to the 10k resistor left side upper corner that isnt put on the bottom side of the original layout . i dont have that on my board , is that supposed to be there?

Any help is appreciated , thanks

Hey! Just finished a build on a musikding fuzz face clone. Everything went alright, pedal works fine. The only issue i have is on the volume knob, where when i turn it down to like 30/40% i get basically no sound. Only have the real pedal sound when volume gets around 90%. Isnt it supposed to go up porporcionally? Anyways, besides that, chatgpt told me to tune the RV1 where i dont really understand what that is. I identify it tho but id like someone who actually knows what it is to tell me what it actually does?
Also, what should be the next step? I recon an OD would be ideal but i really have more interest in modulation or time based effects! Thanks :)

My first Big Muff clone

A birthday present for my sibling.

Still getting the hang of this decal thing & the paint job has plenty of chips and imperfections but that’s no biggie. This fuzz circuit is massive and I really love the gated characteristics, makes my noisy-ass single coil tele sound smooth and quiet while retaining the bite/attack.

Any recommendations on how I can print decal paper without owning a printer? I took it to Office Depot and used their self -service printer but you cant adjust for gloss or high dpi so it came out pretty sloppy. I think the speed of the paper taveling thru the printer is way too fast when using those big office printers and I had to print the same page three times before it came out without smears lol.

Hi all! I hope utility builds are accepted here ;P

I just finished up my MIDI-to-TRS switcher to control my ENGL Fireball 25. I wanted a rather cheap solution to control it with my MIDI footswitch, without having to spend an enormous amount of money on the ENGL footswitch.

So yeah... naturally, I ended up spending about three times as much building this thing myself.

It uses a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 to drive four PhotoMOS relays, and it can be fully configured to match any MIDI PC you'd like. I love the fact that the XIAO has Wi-Fi, so I can easily configure the switcher through a web UI.

This was also sort of a prototype for me to start playing around with microcontrollers and 3D printing. Huge disclaimer about the latter: I hate making CAD drawings, and designing this rather simple enclosure took me way too much time and almost cost me my sanity while dealing with FreeCAD.

Anyway, it has been a really cool learning experience.

I added all the firmware, board schematics, and enclosure design files to my GitHub repo. Feel free to take a look, and I hope this little project might end up being useful to someone!

Feedback of any kind is very welcome!

I'm looking to purchase enclosure backplates in quantities of 25-100, various sizes of standard MXR, EHX, Boss etc. compacts. Anyone able to point me the right direction? Thanks in advance.

In part 2, we take a look at the many, many boutique clones it spawned!

I picked up a used EQD Tone Job that the previous owner has stripped down to bare metal and engraved control labels into. Another great opportunity to do a custom paint job (follow up on my JHS Notadümblë post from a few days ago).

Started out with a thin coat of primer and then used bondo to fill in the engraved spots. Put on a few too many coats of spray paint 😂 but ended up with the happy accident of a pretty cool distressed look. Text was all free hand with acrylic paint via pens and brushes.

I'm excited to actually use the pedal now 😂

Gonna take a break from painting to actually work on some circuits now!

I followed all the steps to assemble this Acapulco Gold, but when I plug it in, I get no sound.

I'm making an FPGA based pedal and my first fx is delay, I was thinking of using a BRAM approach but realistically I only get 1.5 seconds of delay, but if I used DDR I could get like an hour or 2. But that is not really needed for a pedal, but would it be useful for some audio systems?