It's Been Awhile

[fuzzyhead]

I've built and modded a handful of pedals before but I've haven't built or modded pedals in over a year now and I'm looking to get back into it. I'm thinking about building and overdrive, maybe a clone of some sort. I wouldn't say I'm an expert at pedal building or creating circuits (all my builds have been from following layouts. I'm not very good at reading schematics yet) but I know enough to consider myself a DIY'er. My mind has been wandering a little... So this might be a dumb question but here it goes... General question first: Is it possible to just add things to pedals like switches or extra pots for more creativity and control? Or does it all depend on the circuit? More Specific question: Like I said earlier, I'm wanting to build an overdrive (I think) but this goes for all types of pedals I guess... Can I add a two or three band EQ to a pedal easily or does depend on what the curcuit allows? Or for an overdrive, adding a 3-way switch for diodes?


For my modding side: Can I replace pots for different values to allow for more or less of ie. Tone? I'm aware or swapping resistors and caps for different values but I'm unfamiliar with swapping pots and how they can affect your pedal.

This may be the dumbest thing you've read all day (I'm apologizing in advance) but I'm just looking for some clarification.

Thanks

[nocentelli]

Is it possible to just add things to pedals like switches or extra pots for more creativity and control? Or does it all depend on the circuit?

There are a few occasions when totally shorting a resistor may fry a chip or two, but every pedal circuit can be modified. In general terms, altering caps and resistors in the AC/audio/signal path will alter the sound somehow and rarely cause the device to fall silent; However, altering connections to DC (i.e. connections to the power, ground, half voltage "virtual ground, 4.5v etc) can be value sensitive and lead to the sound cutting out and/or damaging something. This is heavily caveated (e.g. caps to ground are common, easy and effective mods for tone controls), but a decent rule of thumb for beginners.

In more specific terms, mixing together different dirt circuits with different EQs is an endless source of enjoyment for many and is simply a matter of trying things out. If you have a look at some common pedal schematics and read up on the circuits you will learn about how tone controls work (Duncan's tonestack calculator is a great tool for visually appreciating how the components of common tonestacks affect the EQ), potential issues like impedance mismatching and what sort of tone controls are useful in particular contexts.

[blackieNYC]

If you read about the Big Muff Pi tone control, and the simply wonderful tone control at,say, AMZ/muzique, you'll start to recignize them in other schematics or even layouts.  Generally, if an EQ is added to a standard circuit (fuzz, MXR D+, etc) an extra(simple) gain makeup stage needs to be considered. But often you can get away without one - sometimes when there is an over abundance of output volume.  For an experiment, you could wire up the output of one of your built pedals to a breadboard, and build some of these filters and eqs.