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Pedal Projects

DIY: How to Use Flanger, Chorus, Phaser & Vibrato on Guitar — Plus Modulation in Modern Music!

PG's Nikos Arvanitis explains and demonstrates the individual sonic qualities and contrasting characteristics of the most-used modulation effects on guitar by citing the Police, Heart, Prince, Nirvana, Whitesnake, and Pearl Jam.

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The finished BYOC Classic Delay kit (Photo 1).

Never kit-built a stompbox? It’s easy—if you let pro pedal maker Alex Guaraldi of CopperSound be your guide. Here, he takes you on a step-by-step tour as he assembles a Build Your Own Clone Classic Delay.

For this DIY adventure, we’re going to be walking through the steps of building the Classic Delay pedal from Build Your Own Clone (BYOC), a company that has been a big player in the pedal-kit game for quite a while. This is a little more complicated than building a fuzz or overdrive, so I’m going to explain the process with great detail. Let’s get started.

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Fig. 1

Lots of players love treble-bleed circuits, but they don’t play well with fuzzes. Here’s how to fix that.

Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage! This month, we will take a deeper look into a problem that occurs when using a treble-bleed network on a volume pot. We’ve talked about treble-bleed networks in detail before. A lot of players, including myself, can’t live without one, while other players don’t like the effect a treble-bleed network will have on their tone when rolling back the volume. When using a treble-bleed network together with an old-school fuzz or booster, you can get into some trouble. Same for using such a device with an active guitar circuit or after an active buffer device. The tone will start to sound harsh and not desirable at all. So why is this and what can be done about it?

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Looking for more classic growl in a simple, contemporary overdrive? CopperSound’s Alex Guaraldi explains how to swap the clipping LEDS in an ultra-affordable EarthQuaker Devices Plumes for germanium diodes, in nine easy steps.

Pedals offer a lot of opportunities for DIY projects. One of the coolest and easiest is removing the LED clipping diodes in a modern overdrive pedal and replacing them with old-school-sounding germanium ones. The result will be a more raw, aggressive tone. For this project, I used the popular and affordable EarthQuaker Devices Plumes ($99 street). Whether your version is the original with through-hole-type components or the current model with surface-mount components, you’ll easily be able to perform this mod because both versions contain through-hole-type LEDs.

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DIY: 7 Must-Try Wah Techniques

PG’s own Nikos Arvanitis takes the crying out of wah-wah with this simple guide to seven techniques for the venerable device.

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