A Man, A Plan, A Soldering Iron, Pt. 2: The Fuzzening

When last we checked in, I was yakking about my first few projects, which culminated in a buffer-the-tone-vampire-slayer pedal. With that pedal working like gangbusters, I tackled my next two projects: a CS-3 mod and a few Fuzz Faces, two of which would be Christmas gifts.

My Boss CS-3 compressor/sustainer was a gift from my buddy Mike Nix, who is, I should say, a hell of a guy. He knew I was down in the dumps and sent me the pedal to cheer me up. I'm saying now, in this public-ish forum, that I will build him something cool to say thanks.

Compressors, for those who may need a refresher, squeeze the sound to flatten the volume. An uncompressed guitarist can play quiet or loud based on how hard he or she hits the strings, but a guitarist playing through a compressor plays every note at the same volume. This produces a sharp and clean effect, one often used by country guitarists. A compressor also sustains each note by raising the volume on the note's usual decay, which can give the guitar a pleasant overdrive effect.

The general consensus on CS-3s is that they are the most inferior compressor that Boss has produced, but there was a wealth of information online to how to tighten up the sound. I made a workplan based on a number of sources:

• Ovnilabs;
• Brian Wampler (his mods have been taken down from indyguitarist, but can be found, along with some other recommendations here);
• a helpful guide from Lone Phantom;
• Recommendations in the Ultimate Guitar forum;
• Some that popped up on DIY Stompboxes from a guy calling himself Sava.
• More on Sava's stuff here.

Here's the technical side of what I replaced. Please feel free to skip this if you have no interest in pedal modification.

1. LED Mod: I switched out the LED and R35, which Sava had incorrectly listed as R33 somewhere. That was a little tight.

2. Wampler/Fat Body/Ovnilabs Mods. I switched out:

• C1 (was a .027uF cap, is now a .22uF cap)
• R5 (10k to 470 ohm)
• R36 (10 k to 100 ohm)
• R32 (220 ohm to jumper)
• D10 (1N4148 to jumper)
• C2 (.022 to .1uF)
• C13 (.047 to 2uF [two 1uF caps wired in tandem, which is too big for the board, but barely fits, so there])
• C4, C6, C14, and C17 (1uF to 1uF film cap).

These changes made the pedal sound much, much better. Highly recommended.

3. Ultimate Guitar Mods:

• D2, D3, and D6 (didn't record what the diodes were, but I switched them for 1N34A)
• C10 and C16 (.047uF to .1uF)
• C9 (didn't record what it was, switched for .047uF
• IC1 and IC2 (used a stacked board from Monte Allums to lift the dual stacked opamp daughter board over the main CS-3 board and switched the DIPs for a RC4558P and a BBOPA2134PA) 

I didn't hear much different from the capacitor changes. The diodes gave the sound a little more clipping. The major thing was the op-amps. The new ICs took the sound from great to AWESOME.

4.  Sava Mods:

• C7 and C15 (.01uF to the same in metal film)

Heard no difference. If I were to do this again, I'd leave all the capacitor changes from the last two mods out. Here's an image of the board. Note Monte Allums's boards sticking up on the right side. One is folded partly down, but the other has room to stick straight up on the board. I added all the reddish brown caps and the jumpers, but I'm too lazy to figure out what else.

Here's how it looks. I painted an infinity symbol over the 3 in its title, but that's pretty silly in retrospect. Here's a video of someone playing a CS-3 with the Wampler/Full Body mod. Mine sounds sort of like this, but it pops more.



Feeling pretty good about the success of the CS-3 mod, I decided to tackle the traditional first pedal build of the nascent pedal hacker: the venerable Fuzz Face. One of the earliest guitar pedals, the Fuzz Face uses positive ground germanium transistors to distort the heck out of the sound. Discerning fans will recognize this as the key component of Jimi Hendrix's tone. Here's a demo:



After some discussion with my wife, I decided that a household with two curious kids was no place to keep the kind of chemicals I would need to make my own PCBs. Probably a good idea for the time being. This time I bought materials from two of the best vendors out there:

• Mad Beans Pedals: Brian at Mad Beans makes some of the best available PCBs for hobbyists. As I intend to document, I've bought from him pretty much every time I've built a pedal. I bought Mangler boards from him. 
• Small Bear Electronics: Steve at Small Bear was one of the first online hobby shops to provide high-quality components for pedal builders. He offers parts that no one else can touch. I bought enclosures and components from him, especially the germanium transistors I needed.

I decided to build three. One for me, one for my brother-in-law Jeff, and one for my pal Matt. The transistors at the heart of the pedals must be paired together, one with a high output within certain restrictions and one with a low output. Also, since these are vintage components that have hardly any uses outside of pedal building, they are quite scarce. I intended to buy three pairs of tested and paired transistors from Small Bear, but he wrote me that his stock was too depleted for that. Instead I wound up buying one set of paired transistors and about ten untested and unpaired ones. Using information from a handful of websites (this one was the best), I learned how to test these transistors and pair them myself.

I also decided to add a dying battery simulator directly into the pedal using the crystal-clear instructions from Dano of Beavis Audio Research, which is, flat-out, one of the best damn sites out there for pedal hobbyists. Dano, if you ever read this: thanks, man. You are the best.

So I populated the board and drilled out the enclosures. As the photo on the right shows, I used Hammond 1590BB enclosures and drilled them out with the idea of putting the footswitch on the right and an extra potentiometer, which I'll always call a pot from now on, on the left. I used MXR-style knobs and put a rubber MXR-style foot control on the dying battery pot. Here's what they looked like with the knobs attached before being painted.

And here's what they look like when painted. Matt got the red one and Jeff got the yellow one. The green one lives on my pedalboard. When I want Stooges tone, that's where I go.

Next time: The Rat and how to fuck it up.

A Man, A Plan, A Soldering Iron, Part I: The Why

I am a guitarist of the indie-rock/anything-goes school. Although I’ve been playing for 27 years, I’m pretty much resigned to maxing out as an okayish player, which may even be a generous self-assessment. Despite my limitations, playing music and being a part of bands have been an important part of my life and I don’t really want to quit just because I’m, y’know, old and busy with other things and not that great of a musician. In recent years, I’ve become more interested in tone, which is an aspect of music that comes with a price tag attached.

For most of the time I’ve played electric music, I’ve played fairly clean. Guitar, cord, amp. No pedals. I spent money on the best guitar and amp I could get at the time, and if I had any other cash, I spent it on different instruments. I’ve lacked confidence – justifiably – in my guitar playing, and through most of my 20s, I played bass, mandolin, a smattering of other instruments, and only occasionally guitar in bands. In my 30s I started taking the guitar more seriously, mostly under the influence of my friend Matt, who is a very good guitarist. Matt encouraged me to invest in a few pedals for added grit and to think about my tone. Recently I’ve gone far past the tasteful few pedals that Matt surely meant.

So, first off, I play through a vintage 1965 Princeton Reverb. I’ve replaced the speaker twice, once with a Weber 10” alnico and, more recently, with a Weber 12” alnico. I have held onto a number of guitars that show off my financial limitations: a Tokai Strat copy, a Tokai Telecaster copy, an Epiphone Sheraton that I modded into a Casino with some mini-P-90s, and, within the last three months, a J. Mascis Squier Jazzmaster, which is now my main axe. All of which is to say that I have decent enough equipment. The Princeton breaks up beautifully when overdriven (starting at about 5 on the volume knob) and has top-notch chorus and reverb settings built into it. My guitar has excellent tone, and as long as I'm happy with the straight guitar to amp sound that I have, everything is fine. But I'm not satisfied with a single sound.

Last summer I had some severe medical problems that damaged my right leg, and I've been a lot less active since. I was also unemployed for about 18 months that included all of 2011. Towards the end of the year, with too much time on my hands and not a lot of money, I decided that I was try my hand at modifying my meager guitar pedals.

The pedals I'd been carrying around for years were a Catalinbread Chile Picoso clean boost, a Danelectro (Dano from here on out) Daddy-O (which is pretty much the same thing as a Marshall Guv'ner overdrive), a beat-up MXR Distortion + from the 70s, a Dano Rocky Road rotating speaker simulator, all of which were offset from the main line by a Loooper loop pedal, and a Boomerang 2 phrase sampler. Here's a post from 2005 that included my brief flirtation with running the phrase sampler through a cheap-o Sunn 0))) 112. I believed that the Catalinbread was true-bypass (meaning that my signal was unaffected by the electronics inside the pedal when it was off), and the other pedals were branched off of my main line by the Loooper until I wanted them, so I had a pretty clean line, or so I thought, from guitar to amp. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first modification ("mod," from here on) was to the Rocky Road pedal, and I did this back in 2003 or 2004. Those pedals came with a gain issue, so they were super-loud when switched on. Danos are not true-bypass pedals, meaning that they always affect your signal, which is why I had it on one of the Loooper loops, but the gain issue made it an unusable pedal. However, with a quick jumper between two pads, I had a fine, cheap, although unbypassed pedal.

The second modification: So when I decided to start messing around with pedal mods last September, I started with my other Dano, which was sounding duller and duller over the years. I bought a kit from Monte Allums, the Tri-Gain TNT mod. The Dano now sounds much better than it did, although I never use it anymore for other reasons, mainly because it, too, is unbypassed. Just writing about this makes me realize that it is probably time to learn how to bypass a Dano pedal. Anyway, I took no pictures of either of these modifications, but here's someone else's modded Dano. Mine looks much the same.

The third, fourth, and fifth projects were in mid October of last year. After reading about the importance of buffering a long pedal chain, I bought a pre-printed buffer board from General Guitar Gadgets (on the left) and a bunch of components from Pedal Parts Plus. With the board I built my first handmade pedal, a buffer, which is shown at right. I let my kids decorate it with me. It has an utterly superfluous 3PDT true-bypass switch, which it doesn't need because it is an always-on pedal. At the same time, I pulled out the old legacy switch from my MXR Distortion + and replaced it with a 3PDT switch for true-bypass. I also added in jumpers around the input resistors in my Boomerang because it had gotten quite hissy over time.

I built a pedalboard out of an old suitcase around the same time, so my pedal rig as of October 18, 2011 looked like the following picture. Note that I had added a few other pedals over time: a Boss CS-3 compressor/sustainer, a Barber Direct Drive overdrive pedal, an Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy analogy delay pedal, and an ultra-shitty autowah that came with a bass I bought from Eastwood Guitars.

This is where I'll leave my story today. Next time: I mod out the CS-3 and build three Fuzz Faces!