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.

TROUBLESHOOTING YOUR GUITAR’S VOLUME CONTROL

Your electric guitar’s volume and tone controls are a fast, convenient way to raise and lower your guitar’s bass, mid, treble, and output volume without having to make adjustments at the amplifier; this is extremely helpful when practicing and performing, enabling you to tweak your tone and volume in the middle of a song.

When your guitar’s volume control fails the wires and connections need to be inspected. You’ll want to use your digital multimeter (DMM) to measure the resistance in ohms of the volume potentiometer. Potentiometers, or pots, are the electronic components to which the guitar’s volume and tone knobs attach. The problem with your volume control can be easily isolated and repaired with this simple three-step troubleshooting guide.

(Note: You’ll need a digital multimeter and small Phillips-head screwdriver. Ensure that your guitar is not plugged in to anything while testing your volume controls and, if you have any active electronics, remove their batteries.)

Step One

Remove all plates, knobs, and pickguards preventing access to your guitar’s electronics. Gibson-style guitars usually have a plate on the back of the body that covers the guitar’s electronics. Fender-style guitars, on the other hand, are generally accessed from the front, requiring you to remove the pickguard and the knobs attached to the potentiometers.

Step Two

Check the volume control pot’s wires and connections for any loose soldering or shorts. A loose or broken connection might be the source of the problem and this can be easily fixed by resoldering the connection with your soldering iron.

Step Three

Next you’ll want to test the volume pot using your digital multimeter. Set the DMM’s meter dial to 200k on the ohm (Ω) section of the dial and then turn the guitar’s volume control all the way in one direction. Touch the digital multimeter’s probes to the middle terminal and one of the outside terminals (potentiometers have three terminals). After that turn the volume control in the opposite direction. Depending on the direction the knob is turned the reading on your DMM will increase or decrease. If the reading on your DMM doesn’t change or even show up you’ll know the volume pot is no longer functional and will need to be replaced. The good news is that volume pots are inexpensive and need simply to be soldered.