# BYOC effects



## Emohawk (Feb 3, 2006)

Hey all,

I picked up a bunch of BYOC kits from Scott at axeandyoushallreceive (thanks yet again man!). I've built two the last two nights...the Phase 90 clone & the analog chorus, which I think is based on the EH Small Clone with some other things thrown in.

Much to my amazement, both kits worked the first try - not that I expected the things to not function...but I did build the them myself after all! 

Both kits sound fantastic. I'm not gonna go into infinite detail on them (cause I'd be here all night), but suffice it to say the effects are very warm, clean, and vibrant. Both are exceptionally quiet, even running an AC adaptor. I also did the vibrato mod on the chorus and it's a cool addition for the price of a mini-toggle & drilling a hole for it.

Tomorrow night I may tackle the Octofuzz kit. I'm saving the TS-808 for last. There's so many optional mods included with that kit that I don't really know what I want to do with it.


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## Yerffej (Feb 7, 2006)

Yeah my 808 copy is WICKED. really, really like it


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## Stratin2traynor (Sep 27, 2006)

I built the Large Beaver and the MXR Distortion +. Both were fun to build. Love the beaver.


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## NB-SK (Jul 28, 2007)

Stratin2traynor said:


> I built the Large Beaver and the MXR Distortion +. Both were fun to build. *Love the beaver.*


Now, now. This is a G-rated site. :food-smiley-004:


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## LowWatt (Jun 27, 2007)

Phaser and Chorus were the first 2 kits I built as well. Actually, the first things I ever soldered in my life. The both worked on the first try (actually I put the chip in the chorus in backwards, but it only took about 3 seconds to figure that out and have it working) Love them. Both so warm and swirly. 

Since then I've built the OctaFuzz and the Tremolo. Can't say enough about these pedals. Each one is my favourite that I've tried of that type of effect.


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## Agata0023 (Mar 15, 2007)

I'm going to be getting the Mighty Mouse and the Envelope Filter pretty soon, but before I do, I was wondering what the Mighty Mouse pedal would sound like through a SS amp? I've always loved the sound of the vintage RAT pedals, but I've never played them through a SS. How would it compare - Would it work out well or is it meant more for a tube amp?


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## flashPUNK (Feb 16, 2006)

Anyone have any opinions on the Large Beaver?
I've been thinking about getting this kit as I need a fuzz. the sound samples and videos on youtube sounded pretty great..
Opinions?


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## Stratin2traynor (Sep 27, 2006)

Although I can't compare it to an actual Big Muff, I think the Beaver sounds great. I've had a few fuzzes - Voodoo Lab Superfuzz, Fulltone 70, Fulltone Ultimate Octave and the Beaver is by far my favorite.


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## flashPUNK (Feb 16, 2006)

How does it compare to the Fulltone 69 or 70?

Another thing that draws me to this fuzz pedal is the small case size... I like to keep a pretty tight and small pedalboard (traveling is easier).


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## PaulS (Feb 27, 2006)

Agata0023 said:


> I'm going to be getting the Mighty Mouse and the Envelope Filter pretty soon, but before I do, I was wondering what the Mighty Mouse pedal would sound like through a SS amp? I've always loved the sound of the vintage RAT pedals, but I've never played them through a SS. How would it compare - Would it work out well or is it meant more for a tube amp?


Can't say I've tried it through a SS amp but if you do the mighty mouse kit got to the byoc forum and check out the mods. I did mine with the mods and it adds some different flavours to the pedal.


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## Stratin2traynor (Sep 27, 2006)

flashPUNK said:


> How does it compare to the Fulltone 69 or 70?
> 
> Another thing that draws me to this fuzz pedal is the small case size... I like to keep a pretty tight and small pedalboard (traveling is easier).


I found the Ultimate Octave very smooth and controlled, the '70 was great - I loved it but something was wrong with it and Fulltone decided to completely ignore me after they found out that I bought it second-hand (an example of their inconsistent customer service). I ended up selling them both and buying the Large Beaver.

The Beavers, I found has more range in sound. It can be pretty smooth or completely raw and fizzy. It's the best of both worlds. Well worth every penny.


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## Kapo_Polenton (Jun 20, 2007)

Not sure if i commented already but i am not entirely in love with my delay..sounds great clean, is a little frumpy distorted..


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Not to take anything away from BYOC, but there is also a nice set of projects/kits from J D Sleep at www.generalguitargadgets.com as well as from Francisco Pena at www.tonepad.com. Many of the projects are the same as found at BYOC (doesn't EVERYBODY have a TS-808 clone these days?), but many are also different and unique. Tonepad has a clone of the black Ross Phaser, which is itself a clone of the older Small Stone. There is a ton of mods you can do with these, and Francisco also provides layouts/bloards for adding more stages so that you can easily build 8, 12, or even 16-stage phasers easily.

Again, all these places deserve your patronage, but certainly don't limit yourself to what is provided by only one of them.


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## PaulS (Feb 27, 2006)

I find the circuit boards of the BYOC to be of a much better quality than those available from GGG. Have built kits from both vendors and have always had good results from the BYOC kits.


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## Wheeman (Dec 4, 2007)

I've just built a DOD OD 250 (very similar to the MXR Distortion+) from scratch (enclosure, the circuit board, etc.)

A couple great resources for this sort of thing:
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/
http://www.geofex.com/

Looking back, one of those kits would have been the better option, but being cheap and having lots of free time I did it from scratch.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Excellent recommendations. I've known geofex whiz (and now Visual Sound engineer) RG Keen for over 15 years, since the days of alt.guitar when all we had were text-based screens and drew schematics with punctuation. He was smart then, but he's gotten smarter and smarter. The diystompbox forum has been a 2nd home to me for over a decade, when it was part of the former AMPAGE site.

The means for making one's own pedals from scratch have gotten easier and cheaper within the past decade. So much so that cottage "boutique" pedal businesses have sprung up like mushrooms. Most information and supplies that were off-limits to all but the most knowledgeable and well-connected a decade ago are widely available now. Any doofus can score 3PDT stompswitches, decent quality PCBs, and semi-finished Hammond chassis for a pittance, and things like obscure out-of-production chips and transistors that haven't been made in 30 years can be bought pretested.

Partly in response to the surge in analog DIY and boutique activity, as well as the everything-for-peanuts philosophy of Behringer and Danelectro, the major manufacturers have had little recourse but to leap headlong into the world of digital FX, leaving an increasingly wide berth for companies like BYOC, Keeley, Indyguitarist, GGG, and Tonepad, among many others.


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## Warren (Mar 2, 2007)

This thread is giving me serious GAS. I was considering getting a couple of kits, tremolo & octave fuzz and giving it a shot. My kids could paint the boxes! But, the way you guys are talking about this I'm afraid it may become an addiction.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Warren said:


> This thread is giving me serious GAS. I was considering getting a couple of kits, tremolo & octave fuzz and giving it a shot. My kids could paint the boxes! But, the way you guys are talking about this I'm afraid it may become an addiction.


It can become, well, a tad "immersive". When you start to think of pedals in terms of "Well that looks easy, and its only a coupla pots, op-amps and a few dozen passive components", the urge to try this out and that out gains a certain attraction. Until you reach a point where making a *properly working* pedal is a matter of spending 3 hours and boxing it up the same night, you have to factor in the time spent shopping for parts, and especially debugging. Places like BYOC can certainly save plenty of time for part of that, but they sure as shooting can't save you from making a cold solder joint on your own and taking 2 months to track it down.

Still, I'm on the last laps of making myself and populating a pair of frac-rac chassis that will house 24 modules (2.5 x 4" @) with remote switching when done (with another dozen I can pop in and replace when I feel like more of this and less of that). And that's just the small ones where I *only* need 4 or 5 controls for the effect in question (more complex stuff goes in bigger chassis or rackmount). many of the modules cost me about $10 a pop, including ALL components, jacks, etc.

So yes, it can become a little too "immersive", and cut into family time if you're not careful.

For chassis, I can certainly suggest the pre-finished powder-coated enclosures from pedalpartsplus and Small Bear. If you live in the same Canada I do, the season for spray-painting and baking finishes with the windows or garage door open has pretty much ended for the next 6 months. If you have kids, you'll want to keep the paint-stink out of their lives...not to mention your marriage! I can heartily recommend fine-tipped paint-pens available at many art-supply places as a cost-effective, stink-free, and easy way to decorate and legend pedals.

Take a gander here to see what others have done. Be careful, though. Not only is it 193 screens long, but some of this stuff is simply dazzling and inspiring. http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=36392.0


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## Wheeman (Dec 4, 2007)

mhammer said:


> It can become, well, a tad "immersive". When you start to think of pedals in terms of "Well that looks easy, and its only a coupla pots, op-amps and a few dozen passive components", the urge to try this out and that out gains a certain attraction. Until you reach a point where making a *properly working* pedal is a matter of spending 3 hours and boxing it up the same night, you have to factor in the time spent shopping for parts, and especially debugging. Places like BYOC can certainly save plenty of time for part of that, but they sure as shooting can't save you from making a cold solder joint on your own and taking 2 months to track it down.
> http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=36392.0


To be able to build one in 3 hours would be nice. It took me 3 *months* to finish one. It was worth it though, for that customizable sound and tone. I kept returning to R.G. Keens site for info on how to debug and for the electrical theory.


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## Warren (Mar 2, 2007)

mhammer said:


> It can become, well, a tad "immersive". When you start to think of pedals in terms of "Well that looks easy, and its only a coupla pots, op-amps and a few dozen passive components", the urge to try this out and that out gains a certain attraction. Until you reach a point where making a *properly working* pedal is a matter of spending 3 hours and boxing it up the same night, you have to factor in the time spent shopping for parts, and especially debugging. Places like BYOC can certainly save plenty of time for part of that, but they sure as shooting can't save you from making a cold solder joint on your own and taking 2 months to track it down.
> 
> Still, I'm on the last laps of making myself and populating a pair of frac-rac chassis that will house 24 modules (2.5 x 4" @) with remote switching when done (with another dozen I can pop in and replace when I feel like more of this and less of that). And that's just the small ones where I *only* need 4 or 5 controls for the effect in question (more complex stuff goes in bigger chassis or rackmount). many of the modules cost me about $10 a pop, including ALL components, jacks, etc.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the advice, the paint pens sound like a great idea, and I planned to do 2 things for the project,

1. Get help from a friend of mine that is very good at this stuff (he builds pedals & amps).
2. Wait until summer is back.

And that solidifies my plan!


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

I started exploring paint pens because I like the look of light legending on dark backgrounds. I have a huge stack of black rub-on lettering that I still use a great deal on boxes that are light in colour, but sometimes you just like the look of white letters on a black or deep red or blue chassis. Unfortunately, the only place I've been able to find white rub-on lettering these days is in those scrap-booking places or stores like Michaels that might sell scrapbook supplies. Of course, what's great for scrap-booking turns out to suck big time for building pedals. There is little choice in font size or style, and it seems you can never get enough "z's" (and "fuzz" requires two of them....each and every time).

So, after admiring the look of Z-Vex pedals for a long time, I figured I'd try out free-hand and stumbled onto paint pens. They run about $3-5 a pop, and very much like inkjet printers you need to keep using them or they dry up. But they can provide nice rich colour if used right and if your penmanship is decent. The lettering holds up nicely in the complete absence of overcoats, and if you screw up, all you need to wipe the slate clean is a Q-tip dipped in methyl hydrate (paint thinner).


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## Guiary (Oct 10, 2007)

Just curious, with your phase 90 clone do you find that it gets lost when placed infront of the amp (before distortion)?? That's my problem with it, I can seem to get it to cut through my distortion, all it does is make it a little thicker.

Other than that on the clean channel it sounds awesome!!! and through the effects loop.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Phase before distortion sounds different than phase after a distortion, the same way that wah sounds different before vs after. The difference is generally one of what I like to call "focus".

Why does this happen?

Any sort of clipping stage, whether it is a pedal or the amp's front end, requires a signal meeting a certain amplitude criterion in order to clip. We, as players, think in terms of riffs and such but the circuitry only cares about the absolute amplitude at *THIS MICROSECOND*.

Phasers, whether BYOC or any other, from 2-stage to 24-stage monsters, produce notches, and notches are by definition a reduction in the amplitude of the signal at some designated point. Stick a phaser just ahead of a distorting stage, and what will happen is that as the phaser produces a notch at frequency F, the signal in that zone will fall below the clipping threshold, even while other parts of the signal fall above it. The end result is that you are adding harmonics from some parts of the signal but not so much from others. The fact that the distortion stage adds both gain and a sort of compression of dynamic range, the dips and peaks in volume will be evened out such that most of what you notice is the tonal change range than the volume change. This yields a kind of "animation" to the sound since the distortion will become "defocussed".

Okay, now flip the order.

Feed your guitar to a distortion and whatever you dial in with the controls and your picking, pickups, etc., will determine the quality, and more importantly the emphasis points in the harmonics added by the distortion stage. If you stick a phaser AFTER that, then the swept notch will, at some point, impose its own volume adjustments and simply kill the level of a fundamental or of a range of harmonics. In other words, where phaser-distortion simply shakes up the harmonics added, fuzz-phaser forces you to pay attention to the notches created.

Personally, I don't think either one is better. They both have their uses. Many players will probably notice that phasers placed before distortion stages start to sound very "Hendrix-ey" and not unlike Univibes in their signal path. In fact, Hendrix would place his UNI-vibe before the Fuzz Face to lend that "animation" to his tone. Since the notches created by Uni-vibes tend to be shallower and broader, they produce even less "focus" than a conventional phaser would, and that seems to enhance the animating aspect even moreso.


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