Building a Distortion Pedal with a Kit

Distortion pedals — which compress the peaks of your electric guitar’s sound wave and add overtones, resulting in a warmer, dirtier, and fuzzier guitar tone popular in rock, blues, punk, and metal music — are the most popular effects pedals around and you can easily build your own distortion pedal with a kit. Let’s have a look at the process of distortion pedal assembly. You’ll need a distortion pedal kit, wire strippers, a screwdriver, and a soldering iron.

Build Process

First off, you’ll need your distortion pedal kit, which you can buy from a number of online retailers. There are a variety of different types of distortion pedals so you’ll need to make a decision on what type of distortion suits the music you play. A Tube Screamer-type pedal sounds much different than pedals based on Big Muff or Turbo Rat circuits. If you play grunge or punk music you’ll want a fuzzier distortion pedal with lots of overdrive and, if you play the blues, you’ll want a pedal with good compression and more midrange.

Take the components from your kit and attach them in the appropriate places on the perfboard. The components will plug straight into the board and should fit securely in their respective slots. These components consist of capacitors, transistors, and diodes. Every kit is different, so be sure to consult your kit’s schematic to find out what goes where.

Strip the kit’s wires’ ends with your wire strippers and wrap the stripped ends around the terminals of each of the components. The wires are likely all one color, meaning that you don’t have specific wires for specific components. Although all kits are different, you can expect to connect five to ten wires to the terminals.

After allowing your soldering iron or soldering station to warm up, solder the wire connections. A mildly active rosin-core solder is best for these kinds of circuits.

Attach the perfboard to the bottom of the pedal’s chassis. Use your screwdriver and the included screws to secure the perfboard in place.

Then secure the top part of the pedal’s chassis to the bottom half. Plug your distortion pedal into the wall and test it out. If you plug the pedal in and the LCD doesn’t light up when you turn the pedal on then you’ll need to check your connections. If the light does come on and no sound comes out of your amp or the sound cuts in and out with you guitar plugged into the pedal you’ll need to take the pedal apart and ensure that everything is correctly connected.

So long as you have experience with a soldering iron, building a distortion pedal from a kit is a rather straightforward process that will give you the experience and confidence you’ll need to start building more complex circuits.