Greetings from Greece

[George]

Greeting fellow DIYers

My name is George and in a nutshell, i am a 25 yo unemployed Civil & Structural Engineer from Greece with love for good music, women and fishing. I like making stuff in general, mainly because as you may already know, you cannot easily find/buy customised and quality products.

Throught the projects and posts of the madbeanpedals community, my knowledge and love about making my own pedals grew more and more. So i started maintaining and then modifying my own gear, a journey that led in making my own guitars, speaker cabins, cables etc (and pedal,only 1 ).

I dont sell any of my creations, i find pleasure in helping others customise or upgrade their gear because i believe that musical instruments/gear are not only tools for making sounds but also something that can inspire you to play and create more.

And now that you know a few things about me i'd like to ask you a thing or two. My experience with soldering is wiring guitars and modifying some of my pedals (for true bypass switching and other small mods). For starters i want to make a BOOSTER and a FUZZ, from what i know both of them are not super difficult to make (later maybe i try a delay).

• BOOST: Clean boost that can also be dirty with a switch or somethin
• 
  FUZZ: All around, smooth and harse, mainly classic sounds nothing too extreme

From your experience making and playing with pedals from madbean projects what should i choose (from old or new projects)?

THANKS a lot for the knowledge that obtained lurking here and your replies.

P.S. I didnt find a post in this forum with an image as a signature, and i thought maybe its in the rules or somethin not to have an image. I search the rules and found nothing about it so i made a signature image for fun, if its against the rules let me now.

[micromegas]

Hi George!

Welcome to the forum. 25 years old  unemployed engineer from one of the four European countries some people refer to as PIGS... that sounds familiar (Adán here, 25 yo, EE, from Spain ).

If you want to start easy with a boost and a fuzz here are my 2 cents:

Booster: a bacon bits, little and great sounding. Only one thing: don't try to build it into a 1590A box, start with a 1590B, it will look cleaner and would be less pain in the ass.....

Fuzz: a lot of diy people start building pedals by putting a Fuzz Face together. I wouldn't go that way, you need the right transistors to get it to sound right and some adjustment (most people get dissapointed with the sound they get in the end) plus it is not a pedal for everyone.... If what you want is a classic fuzz but not too extreme, build any of the Big Muff versions you can build with the Mudbunny PCB, listen to some of them on youtube, read some opinions from the internet (not from TGP!!! Kitrae is a good resource to learn about Big Muffs...).

Enjoy!
If you need anything (components or advice) just let me know, I'll try to help in the best way I can.


Cheers!
Adán

P.S.: regarding forum rules... there aren't many things banned here. Just be polite, respect others' work and, if you want to start selling pedals based on a pcb/design and the designer has not written any clause about that, just ask him for permission, is the right thing to do IMO.

[Luke51411]

Welcome to the forum! Glad to have you aboard and will be looking forward to your build reports, hope to see some of the guitars you've built as well!

[George]

Thanks for your quick replies.

Adan of course i am familiar with PIIGGS i was studying/working in UK the past 5 years and i know how some people refer to us, also two of my roomates where from Spain and i have to mention that we had a lot in common and a lot of fun.

Your reply helped me and i am going for the BACON BITS. As for the FUZZ i have to search a bit more to find exactly what i want. In Greece we have two very good pedal makers but their pedals are a bit expensive for me (JAM pedals and Crazy Tube Circuits).
I like the sound of this pedal made by CTC (lead and rythm sounds both) it has a pic of the circuit's backside in the video as well maybe you recognise smth there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7BX4QIGVus

ALSO
Luke you already saw one of my guitars in my signature - from the looks you cant say a lot but maybe i post a sound clip someday. Untill then check some of my other guitars

dont mind the knob and the ding - i had no record of this guitar and when i asked my friend to bring it for a photo i found this

this is the project i am curently working on - a modification (change of shape, color and hardware) for a friend (at least he buys the parts )
i know its big and expensive mod but this guitar was a gift to him and he wanted to upgrade and play it properly.

thats the final design made by me beforehand

hope you like it

[jimilee]

Daaaaaammmmnnnnn.....Welcome to the forum, looks like you may school us a bit.

[micromegas]

Wow!! Those guitars are cool as hell. I'm eager to see how that new finish looks live, it must be outstading...

As for what you said about the great builders: CTC is indeed a good pedal maker, lots of cool circuits and designs. JAM pedals, however, doesn't suit my standard of what I consider a great builder, he is famous, but his work does not impress me in any way. I respect his business, but I've had a dyna-sorr for repair once and this is what I can say: cheap PCB, cheap components, clumsy wiring, a complete clone of the dynacomp (nothing original there) and the finish was cheap and unreliable (the paint was chipped and dirty, it didn't even had a coat of varnish!). Plus charging almost 200€ for a  dynacomp clone... there are better options out there.

CTC's Pin Up Fuzz claims to be a mosfet fuzz. I think it could be based on the LLAMA. That circuit uses a CD4049UBE to generate distortion, madbean's discontinued project "Snarkdoodle" is based on it.

If you are into that kind of fuzz but don't care about the octave, try  the "Tape Demo Fuzz" from Mid-Fi Electronics, rullywow sells a PCB for it and there's an etchable one on this forum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPERpV3h0Jc

If you want a more similar fuzz, nasty and with octave, try Madbean's Wolfshirt, it is based on the Foxx Tone Machine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o18phkCgRNo

[Luke51411]

Stunning looking guitars! Great work.

[teknoman2]

Outstanding work mate and killer axe....
Welcome to the forum, also let you know that you aren't the only Greek here, Ettore_M and me are also fellow greek pedal addicts....
Now regarding the fuzz suggestion similar voiced to CTC is the Rust Bunny.
Jon did a group buy while ago and I think that he is gonna have some spare boars.

http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=20228.0

Cheers,
Panos.

[TGP39]

Welcome George. I love your guitar building skills. Very classy! I'm going to take a look at the CTC pedals you mentioned. Ask any questions. We are here to help each other.

Steve.

[cooder]

Awesome stuff welcome to the forum!

[George]

I am glad you liked the guitars and thanks a lot for the warm welcome.

After searching a bit through your suggestions i made up my mind. I am sure that later i will build some crazy sounding FUZZes but for now the ROCKET WTFuzz seems to be on the spot. I think it was the tromboney quality in the sound that drugged me into FUZZ in first place, and this pedal has it all, ranges from od to some interesting fuzz sounds.

• I am thinking to build it without the boost section

So i know where to buy BACON BITS board and maybe i etch the ROCKET wtfuzz just for the experience, but i have no idea where to buy components,cases,pots etc in large quantities. Up until now, my stash was really small (female jacks,pots and some resistors and caps) , but for guitar building was enough.

Maybe Ettore_M & teknoman2 know a good place to buy compnents in Greece, or maybe its better to buy them from the stores in the ''part soursing'' section. I am consideting to make a big order from one store to keep it simple

• a range of resistors
• a range of caps, electrolytic/film etc
• footswitches/toggle switches
• pontetiometers and of course wire & quality solder/soldertips cause right now i work with whatever have in hand

Feel free to ask me anything regarding guitar building, (not that i am a pro), but i learnt a thing or two in the prossess. I can assist anyone who wants to design something in photoshop/autocad that kind of stuff. And in order to make my message more interesting  i ll post an image of my DIY speaker cab with the added benefit of power sockets for the amp and pedals and a secret switch for parallel/series speaker wiring  (if you want to build a similar one i can provide blueprints).

Any suggestion for shops that sell parts are welcome and i would be glad to contribute in the community any way i can.

[midwayfair]

maybe i etch the ROCKET wtfuzz just for the experience, but i have no idea where to buy components,cases,pots etc in large quantities.

You'll have a blast with the WTF pedal. It's based on the Jordan Bosstone, which is a hugely underrated fuzz. I used something very similar for the "horns" in this song.

You don't really need any special components for it. The transistors can be any lower-gain silicon, so you can get 2n3904 and 2n3906 for those; they're super cheap. http://www.musikding.de/ is one of the good places in Europe, and I'm sure other people here can give you other good places, but as far as building a Bosstone goes, Tayda would be pretty safe for the passive and active components. There are some things -- especially hardware -- I don't trust them for, but you can get all the components for the pedal for a dollar there. (You can read some of the threads on the forum about them ...)