Barbarach BC
I continue working on my micro boost effect. I wasn’t entirely happy with the noise performance from the first take. I wanted to investigate a bit more. How did it go? See the video. Links can be found in section where I’m trying to make sense out of all of this 😊. Intro As a […]
I was thinking for a while to create a booster that is as small as possible. Ever since I bought an old guitar that was sitting unused on someone’s attic for 15 years I was thinking what could I do with it. I have a thing for Ibanez guitars … I don’t know, I just […]
After finishing four different DIY boosters, natural question is – what’s the fascination with them? After all, they just boost guitar signal, not much more. Come to think of it, maybe I should’ve asked myself this question before I started building them, but here we are and better late then never. There are several reasons […]
After the introduction, analysis and breadboarding of two op-amp based guitar boosters, I’ll complete the pedal. I’ll do the final schematic and bill of material, then do the soldering layout for a protoboard. I’ll plan out the enclosure, do some artwork and finalize the enclosure. I’ll finally assemble it and do test and demo. Final […]
After the introduction and analysis of two op-amp based guitar boosters, let’s see how they sound. I’ll breadboard them and try them out to make sure everything works as expected. I’ll give some effect characteristics, do a breadboarding diagram, then do the actual breadboarding (with bill of material) and finally test both effects out. Characterizing […]
I went through schematics for MXR Micro Amp and my Thunder, so now I’ll go through some SPICE analysis for them. I said the circuits are similar and should have pretty similar sound. Let’s see how they look when simulated and if we can learn anything. Schematics Here are the schematics in SPICE: The schematics […]
In this final build, when it comes to simple booster effects, I am going to use Op-Amps. An op-amp is an integrated circuit (a chip) containing several transistors inside of it to achieve a very large gain. But it does so in a way that makes amplifier design very consistent and predictable. In this post […]
I finished building a simple JFET booster over the weekend. I had to do some extra designing of a JFET amplifier to make it boost since the breadboarded version wasn’t boosting the signal. The design is only slightly more complex than previous efforts. You can check out the dedicated build page here.
The next in line for building is a JFET Booster. I chose a Fetzer Valve circuit. This one is a bit different, I had to go through measuring my JFET components and then go through calculating correct component values. I then breadboarded it in two different versions. It was interesting, something different, check it out.
I finished building a simple MOSFET booster today. Simple but effective pedal, clean boost with flat response and great input/output characteristics. Or check out dedicated build page for it.