I purchased the outer housing from a popular pedal hobbyist website to get the aesthetic of the original Tubescreamer. I'm hoping to do custom decorations on future pedal projects!
I made over 100 soldered connections and worked with a range of different capacitors, diodes and transistors over this project
The electrical and mechanical connections took about four hours to make. I spent around the same time debugging the pedal after.
I purchased the outer housing from a popular pedal hobbyist website to get the aesthetic of the original Tubescreamer. I'm hoping to do custom decorations on future pedal projects!
Overdrive Guitar Pedal
I have played guitar for over a decade and have am passionate about analog electronic guitar effects. I saw building my own overdrive pedal as a great opportunity to intersect my passion for guitars with my mechatronics experience. I have always wanted to have my own Ibanez Tube Screamer (a classic used by guitar legends such as Carlos Santana, Jerry Cantrell and Cliff Burton), so I built my own!
This pedal works by driving the "clean" guitar signal through a JRC4558D op-amp, which amplifies the signal with enough gain to give it the crunchy, distorted sound associated with hard rock guitarists. I replicated the original circuit design, sourced components and made all the electrical and mechanical connections. This project significantly improved my electrical signals debugging using an oscilloscope.