Awesome YT Channels About Guitar Gear

I would like to recomand you some great YouTube channels about guitar gear. They are made by very charismatic dudes, who know quite a lot about the stuff they are showing. Really enioyable things for guitar geeks.

Gearmanndude
Because of great stomp-boxes showcase.

Scott Grove
Because of extremely interesting and unique guitar collection.

Rob Chappers
Because of charisma and cool guitar licks and tips.

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.

Cool Boss DS-1 Mods by YT Users

Boss DS-1 is a kind of constructions, where many parts can be changed, and many circuits can be modified. This is why there's so many modded „orange boxes” on the market.

Some mods are just making the pedal a little bit warmer, colder or boosting more middle frequencies. Some of them makes a new kind of guitar effect stomp-box from the stock DS-1. 

Here are some good demos from YouTube, which can show you, what MOD really means.

Parts Selection for DIY Boutique Guitar Gear

Probably many of guitar DIY fanciers would like to make a real boutique guitar pedal or use some high-grade parts in a guitar wiring. In this post I would like to show you my selection of capacitors and resistors, that I'm using in preamps and guitar wirings. All of them are selected as parts with good relation between price and quality. They are also quite easy to find in online stores.

CAPACITORS:

red Wima and brown Elna caps

Film:

Vishay MKT1813
Vishay MKP1837
Wima MKP 2
Wima MKP 4
Wima MKP 10

Electrolytic:

Elna Slimic II
Nichicon KZ
Panasonic FC

Multipurpose Guitar Preamp (With a TL071 Op-amp)

I would like to show you the diagram of a simple guitar preamp unit. It's based only on eight parts (including TL071 op-amp).

The preamp is very flexible in use. Can be mounted in a guitar body - as an on-board preamp or as a part of a guitar effect pedal. It's got low power consumption - perfect stuff for work with a battery.

The preamp is based on a very popular circuit, but with this diagram you will get the clear „how to” that you can easily use in your work with guitar electronics.

3 Legendary and Easy to Build Guitar Pedals

If you want to build at home some guitar effect and you don't have enough time or skills for complicated constructions, but you want to make something with an awesome tone, this is the way to go:

• Dallas Fuzz Face 
• Dallas Rangemaster – treble booster
• MXR Distortion + 

Simple Tone + Volume Stack (tone and volume control circuit)

This is the tone and volume stack that can be used in many types of guitar effect pedals and other, similar gear. It's - in some way - based on the Big Muff tone control and „Stupidly Wonderful Tone Control” from hammer.ampage.org (very useful website for guitar DIY fanciers).

Tone Control for Distortion, Overdrive and Fuzz Pedals

Have you heard about Big Muff Tone Control. It's a very simple, but also very effective tone control circuit, which is an important part of the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedals. It is also used in many other stomp-boxes, including DIY constructions.

This circuit can have a great impact on a tone of distortion, overdrive or fuzz stomp-boxes. Important thing about it, is that this tone control is affecting the pedal signal even when the potentiometer knob is at 12 o'clock.

Here, I would like to present my modification of Big Muff Tone Control. I only have changed the values of  parts - to reach different frequency response. (If you want typical BMTC, search online for it - there are a lot of good sources.)

Guitar Preamp: Buffer + Booster. V2 - Based on NE5534

The NE5534 is a single version of the NE5532 (which is a double op-amp).

Here is the schematic of my preamp with this thing. All other elements are the same, like in previuos (NE5532) schematic: guitar-preamp-buffer-booster-easy-to, new-guitar-preamp-project-ne5532-based.

-

Guitar Peamp: Buffer + Booster (easy to read schematic)

This is the schematic that I wrote about in the post: New guitar preamp project

It shows a construction of a guitar preamp with some untypical switching system and clear, warm tone.

I made it for those of you, who want some more clear and easy plan.

New Guitar Preamp Project - NE5532 Based Buffer + Booster

Today I would like to show you my new design. It's a guitar preamp (buffer + booster). It's based on the same technology like MXR MicroAmp or CMOY.

The heart of the circuit is an operational amplifier: NE5532. I was testing also popular TL071, TL072, like in MicroAmp, but it was a little bit colder and less full than the NE5532.

The NE5532 has got much higher power consumption than the TL072/071, so it should work with some stomp-box power supply.