Design Your Own Guitar Booster

This post is about construction of op-amp based guitar boosters and preamps. You will get here some information, about how they are made, and how you can design and make your own. It's not only about just clean boosters. It's also about mid boosters, treble boosters and bass boosters. Quite useful knowledge for beginning guitar pedal makers.

Here is the schematic of the basic op-amp based booster/preamp. It has got a bypass switch and a volume/boost control potentiometer. I also marked the places, where are frequency filters and the maximum gain control.

About Active Guitar Wirings - Preamps, Buffers, Pickups

I already have few post about active guitar wirings with on-board buffers, but I didn't wrote an article, about reasons of building that stuff and it's benefits. So, here it is.

Some people, who mounted an active wiring with an on-board buffer or a preamp, or have active pickups in their guitars, are saying that this stuff changing the tone dramatically and it's a little bit too bright or less full, smooth sounding. I think, that it comes from some kind of misunderstanding the way how this electronics works.

If you mounted an active wiring, with a completely linear frequency response (for example audio op-amp based), the tone should be much brighter. It's because of transporting a full frequency range. Passive guitar wirings usually cutting off a little bit of treble. Active wirings are usually - like I said before - linear. They will just transport a guitar pickup signal. Thy will not cut anything if you don't want it. It's because of preamp or buffer impedance – high on input, low on output – and characteristic of working with the signal.