If ever you want to build your own guitar amplifier, here’s the first thing you need to build. This is because guitar preamp are not usually sold as a kit unlike amplifiers. Guitar preamp are actually simple and usually consist of 2 stage, first – gain stage which amplifies the signal coming from the guitar and second – the filter stage which boost or cut frequencies that is determined by the user. Some preamp also includes effects such as distortion and reverb as the most common.
Category: Guitar Effects
Tone Control Circuits for guitar effects
There are many tone control designs out there. Let’s take a look at those and analyze each circuit. If you are planning on designing a tone control circuit for your guitar effects, it is not actually that not hard to do. You only need to understand the basics. Please note that these are only passive type tone control meaning you will loose some signal strength when you use this circuit. To compensate for the attenuation caused by this circuit, you will need to add an amplifier circuit with a gain of at least 2.
Arduino based Guitar Effects
There are lots of arduino projects that you can find online. But this one caught my eye and I am excited to make my own copy. Since I also love guitars and programming, this is perfect for my next project. It uses Arduino Due as the main processor. This project is published by www.electrosmash.com/ and you can buy the kit for £39.95(not including the arduino due).
Ibanez Sonic Distortion
Ibanez Sonic Distortion is one of the most famous distortion effects. It is also one of my favorite effects. The sound it produces is warm and thick sounding, great for rock and alternative music. Unlike other distortions out there, the tone control of this distortion is more of a bass rather than treble.
There are plenty of schematic diagrams on the internet so if you have knowledge in electronics, you can easily build one. I build one myself way back when I was in college. I made my own version of the PCB design to make the 3PDT switch attached to the PCB because there are no PCB design out there that arranged like that.
DIY Guitar distortion Effects
Distortion effects is the most commonly used effects for guitars. Every guitar player knows how to use them. Distortion are usually built-in on most guitar amplifiers today on the market. But some amplifiers has overdrive instead of distortion. Overdrive is just a soft distortion and it started way back on vacuum tube days. Overdrive is an effect you hear when cranking up the volume of a tube amplifier. Distortion is produced by hard clipping the signal by using signal diodes.
Guitar Delay Effects project
The design is pretty simple and easy to build. The main delay effects IC is PT2399 which is a cheap solution compared to using complicated and more expensive BBD IC such as MN3207 and the like. PT2399 is digital echo processing IC capable of producing up to 342mS delay with 1.0% THD. You can further expand this to more than 1 second but with the price of higher harmonic distortion which gives not pleasant sound. The resolution of the ADC of the IC is not disclosed on its datasheet, but it sounded good so I guess it’s around 16bit maybe.