Saturday 8 August 2015

Pedal Test Box

After being turned on to the amazing Guitar FX Layouts blog by my friend Jeremy over at GuitarGAS.com, I have been slowly collecting components to start wiring up my own DIY pedals. These guys have documented strip-board layouts for literally thousands of commercially available pedals! It's an amazing body of work and well worth a look for any DIY guitar tinkerer.

With the DIY pedal bug well and truly caught, my first aim was to try my hand at true-bypass, off-board wiring. The idea was to create a test box that could be used to test out subsequent pedal circuits prior to boxing them up. I based my test box on the Test Box project documented by the guys at Guitar FX Layouts, paying close attention to their very useful Offboard Wiring Guide to get the LED and true-bypass wiring correct.

After one false start caused by el-cheapo 1/4" input and output jacks (a lesson learned already!) I got the box wired together without too much trouble.


The box makes use of a 9V input jack for its power supply, breaking out the +9V, ground and input/output connections through a set of spring-loaded speaker connectors. A candidate pedal needs only provide these 4 connections to be looped into the off-board, true-byass wiring provided by the test box.

All in all a very simple project but one that should prove very useful for my pedal builds to come. Stay tuned for first attempt at a DIY pedal build - the Schaller Tremolo - which I plan on starting any day now.

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