All you need to know about capacitors in guitar pedals

Lets continue the series about electronics components you will find in guitar pedals and how they work. Last time we spoke about resistors and role of potentiometers. Time for the second most common component of guitar pedals: the capacitor!

What tools do you need to make DIY guitar pedals?

When I decided to make my own DIY guitar effects, I was totally lost about the tools that I needed: what do I need to build guitar effects? How much does a good soldering iron cost? And what is a good soldering iron? Where can I buy all that?

In this post, I will try to answer all these questions that we ask ourselves when starting. Lets focus on tools! 🛠️

(My bench. It is almost never that clean haha!)

Tutoriel: how to prototype with a breadboard

Prototyping is not always an easy task with guitar pedals. One solution is to heavily mod an existing pedal. But what if you want to start from scratch? How to test things before designing a circuit and solder everything?

Well, we have a simple solution for that: using a breadboard!

Let's go! In this blog post, we'll see why the breadboard is such a cool tool and how you can use it to design and test your own circuits.

Make your own DIY power supply: yay or nay?

Let's be honest: buying a power supply is not the funniest thing ever.

It is quite expensive (and I have to admit that I would have prefered to add another fuzz that I do not need a nice pedal to my pedalboard than a power supply! 😁) and differences between the several models on the market is not very obvious...

So I asked myself: is it possible to make a DIY power supply?

In this blog post, I will explain how a power supply work, what are the good criterias to choose one from an electronics point of view and if it is a good idea to make one yourself. Let's go!

JHS Superbolt clone PCB and the missing JFETs

Hello solderers and pedal maniacs!

Here is my last build: a JHS SuperBolt clone! As you may know, I have already did a clone of this pedal, but I have finally designed a PCB for it!

Here are some pictures:

 

Why I publish my circuits schematics (and why you should do the same!)

When I made my first commercially available pedals, I chose to publish the circuit schematic online. Transparency always has been a missing thing in the guitar pedal marketing world, so it was a very natural move for me.

However, when I spoke about it with friends or colleagues, they all said to me: "why would you do this? You undermine your business by publishing everything!"

So here are my answers about why I think being transparent is a must when making guitar pedals, and why I think you should do the same if you build guitar pedals.

The different types of diodes

There is a very common marketing point that we see all the time with "boutique" guitar pedals: the famous vintage ultra-rare licorn-made type of diodes! Germanium diodes are often associated with a vintage and warm tone, whereas silicium diode sound harsher and fuzzier...

Time for a blog post about it!

What is a diode? How do they work? Which one should I use when making guitar effects?

Univox Superfuzz (from the 70s): history (post 1/2)

People say that I worship the Univox Superfuzz a bit too much, but they are wrong. If I could, I would already have started a sect about this pedal!

It is simply my favorite pedal of all times! First because of its amazingly cool look with the huge "Super Fuzz" rubber pad, and also for its sound that is crazy loud and heavy. Seriously, best-fuzz-out-there!

After seeing Fu Manchu live in March, I could not resist buying one. After selling a kidney on the black market, I was quite lucky because I found a non-working unit on ebay that I could repair by replacing a few electrolytic capacitors.

The Super Fuzz is really the ultimate fuzz for me, so I decided to honor it by writing the most complete article about it. Here is the first part!

Let's go!

Best capacitors for guitar pedals: which one to choose?

I like to say that electronics are like Legos.

If you step on it, it hurts! Just kidding, it seriously works like Legos as well! 😃

You have to choose different bricks (the electronic components: resistors, capacitors, diodes, IC...) and to assemble all of them following a schematic.

The only problem is: like there are different colors for the lego bricks, electronic components are declined in various versions, with the same value.

For instance, many many different capacitors can be found with the same capacitance value: Panasonic SMF, Wima MKP2, FKP2, MKT standard... What a mess! Lets try to make order in all of this, and to see which capacitors are best suited for our use (guitar pedals).

The 6 elements of capacitors

There are globally 6 main types of capacitors: electrolytic, ceramic, film, tantalum, polystyrene and silver-mica capacitors.

The type of the capacitor is simply a description of what it is made of. 

You should also look up for the capacitor working voltage (more on that in a bit). The tolerance of a capacitor is the maximum difference between a capacitor theoritical value and its real value. You should always look for that too; some capacitors can have tolerance values as huge as 40%!

The smaller the tolerance, the better. 😊

Here are a few examples of through-hole capacitors. From left to right: 150pF ceramic capacitor, 1uF tantalum capacitor, 10nF Panasonic SMF film capacitor, 10uF Panasonic FC electrolytic capacitor and a 0.33uF Wima MKP2 film capacitor.

How to build your first DIY guitar pedal (step by step tutorial)

You have never made a guitar pedal before? You are a bit lost and do not know where to start?

Here is the perfect place! I decided to write a full tutorial for beginners, to build an Earthquaker Device Acapulco Gold, step by step. No excuse not to get started!

The Acapulco Gold is a simple, yet very fun pedal to play with, and is perfect for beginners. The circuit is simple and easy to mod as well. With this tutorial, you should be able to build your first guitar pedal!

If everything goes well, you should get a guitar pedal like this in the end:

Debugging DIY guitar effects

Rule #1 in guitar pedal building is: "It NEVER works at the first attempt"

So you will have to learn quite quickly what to do when one of your wonderful DIY guitar pedal is not functional. Fortunately, beginners or tired experts often make the same very common mistakes.

In this article, I made a small list of things to check when your pedal does not work, from the most common to the least common errors. This is of course not an exhaustive list, but it includes a set of common problems and errors that you will surely encounter one day.

Here is my small troubleshooting guide.

Sovtek Bubble Font Russian Big Muff (1995)

A pedal that I recently fixed and a legend in the stoner/doom scene: ladies and gentlemen, here is the almighty Russian Sovtek Big Muff!

This lady is already more than 20 year old. Not as old as the 50 years old Maestro Fuzztone that I fixed before, but still!

Black Hole : Sunn Model T preamp

This is my last pedal I made : a Sunn Model T preamp in a box!

I named it "Black Hole" because of the antimater doom riffs it can generate :)

Modding the Behringer UV300 Vibrato : tutorial

Here is my last ""build", I modded a Behringer UV300 vibrato:

Behringer released a whole series of pedals inspired by not-produced-anymore Boss pedals like the Hyper Fuzz FZ2 (Behringer Super Fuzz 300), the Heavy Metal HM2 (Behringer Heavy Metal 300)...etc. I was really interested in one of them: the Behringer Ultra Vibrato, which tries to emulate the famous Boss VB2.

Enclosure art: how to make good looking DIY pedals

One of the nicest parts of making guitar pedals is having a personalized design. However, it is quite hard to make good looking guitar pedals.

Here are a few techniques to make guitar enclosures pretty! You can of course combine these techniques to get the best looking pedal possible!

I will present you a lot of techniques, from the most basic ones to the most professional looking ones.

1. Bare aluminum enclosure

It is the simplest way to do: just let the enclosure in bare aluminum.

Please don't do that.

Relay Bypass: final code

After the crowdfunding campaign, I decided to update the relay bypass code.

Indeed, this first version was nice, but one main drawback that was feedbacked to me is that the switch was activated on release, which was not always very intuitive or easy to handle. Moreover, I wanted to add a "temporary" bypass option in the Montagne Tremolo.

In this post, I am going to explain a bit the new code and to show you how I did it.

If you have not read my post about Relay Bypass, I highly recommend you to read it before reading this post. All the basics of microcontrollers are presented there.

  Tip! The full code is available on Github. With the relayonpress.c and header.h files, you will have everything needed to code or burn chips.

If you already have a GitHub account, you can Star the project for updates, or Fork it to modify it and make your own Relay Bypass code.

Lets go!

Ground loops and guitar pedals

Yesterday, I received an email from a beginner that decided to make his first guitar pedal. I always enjoy this kind of emails and answering questions is part of the game. This time, he asked me a question that I had several times: "my circuit is noisy, could it be a ground loop?"

Ground loops are part of the legends and myths around DIY guitar pedals. When asking about noise in a setup, it is the most common answer, and is supposed to be the main cause for hum, hiss or other noises that you can have on your first circuits.

So I decided to write a post about it, starting from the begining:

Development Hell: multiple fuzz pedal

Today, I am going to introduce the concept of Development Hell: it is a special place where projects stay when they need a lot of fine tuning before properly work. Unfortunately, I have a few projects that are still burning there, like the one I am going to present today.

It is a multi-fuzz machine! I always felt that a lot of Fuzz are quite a "one trick pony", they have a very characteristic sound that can be modulated by mods, but still sounds "like a fuzz face", "like a big muff"...etc. Moreover, fuzz are usually quite simple circuits, and I find that allowing one spot per fuzz on a pedalboard can quickly be space-inefficient.

So I decided to create a multi fuzz pedal, with no more than 3 different fuzz inside : a germanium Fuzz Face, a Muff Fuzz and a Companion Fuzz, which should provide the 3 main "flavors" of fuzz in this world: a classic warm, soft fuzz face, a "chainsaw", very raspy Companion Fuzz, and a compressed and heavy Muff Fuzz.

On top of that, I added an upper octave generator that allows to combine it with any fuzz, with a potentiometer to adjust the amount of octave. It is based on the Green Ringer circuit, which is a small, but efficient analog octaver circuit.

And of course, I made it fit in a 125B enclosure...

Here it is in its current form:

Hakko FX888D: a $100 high quality soldering station

Let's face it: your good old soldering iron is not always the best pal to work with.

I had some troubles with mine: no support to put it when I busy doing something else than soldering, which can be quite dangerous if it falls or burn something. Moreover, the power cord was quite short and not very flexible, so it was not always easy to find a good "spot" for it in order to be perfectly comfortable. Finally, it takes a long time before getting hot enough to solder, and 30W is sometimes a bit low to solder big potentiometer or jack legs.

So I decided to invest a bit in a soldering station.

After reading a lot on the web, I have found this little gem: the Hakko FX888D, a Japanese soldering station that was recently replaced by the FX888DX version you can find for around $150 on Amazon. 

Here is mine:

Vintage Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ1-A (1966)

The Maestro Fuzz-Tone is simply the first fuzz ever! I felt a bit like an archeologist when inspecting this effect ! Someone gave me this one for repair, experiencing some issues with the built-in jack and the switch. Here it is: