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:

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!)

Tutorial: 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!

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.