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.

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!

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:

14 electronics suppliers for guitar effects (with pros and cons)

Finding good electronics suppliers is a key issue when building guitar effects professionally. Indeed, they play a huge role in traceability and quality of the components (where the components come from and what they are exactly), and also the price of these components. Sometimes, they can also add delays if they are bad with handling orders and shipping it quickly.

Goods electronics suppliers are the root cause of a good build quality for a pedal builder.

With my crowdfunding project, I have an intermediary position. I cannot order directly from manufacturers (because I would have to order thousands of units at least), but I can order from electronics wholesalers!

Already 95% of the components have been ordered, and I already received quite a lot of parts! Here is a picture of the switches I got this morning (more pictures will follow in a next post):