Making your own pedals

The Post your pedal ideas topic, brought up a topic of interest for me, which is making your own pedals. I’m an electrical engineer and have been working with eurorack synthesizers for years, and I’ve been experimenting with building my own modules. I have a design for a compressor that I’m thinking of converting from a module to a pedal.

Has anyone else tried making a bass pedal before? Anything I should watch out for that might be specific to basses? I know that I’ll need to add a pad if I want to use it with both active and passive basses.

Another related question is what pedals don’t exist that you’d like created?

7 Likes

@terb has designed pedals and has built his own amps.

The first question is if you’re planning to do analog or digital.

4 Likes

I made the EMG preamp pedal before without the light, just switch. it’s pretty cool I gave it to my buddy. It’s way easy to do too.

3 Likes

I want to see more about your compression pedal idea.

I’m always interested in mew preamp pedals. I have lots of thoughts on those.

I also have lots of thoughts about the business side of doing something like this.

I saw you’re on the east cost, are you in Raleigh NC?

No, I’m in the DC area, though my brother lives in Durham, so I’ll be in the area next week for Thanksgiving.

1 Like

I believe SushiBox started out as a DIY which then turned into a small scale, yet fully fledged pedal business. He still sells DIY kits, and he’s very active on various pedal chat groups and seems really willing to talk shop.

3 Likes

The design is based on Moritz Klien’s design, but adapted to use components I already had on hand. It is for +/- 5V or 0-10V to integrate with eurorack. He has a great video on it.

1 Like

I very much want to take this course, and also very much know that I don’t have time for it and should start working through my backlog of already-purchased but not yet taken courses instead.

2 Likes

Oh man! That is cool!

1 Like

I’m expecting an email from Mark Smith any day now, yelling at me for starting like 6 courses and getting them all to 10%.

4 Likes