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.

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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.

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DIY DI BOX

A DI box or Direct Injection box is a very useful piece of equipment used to connect keyboard, guitars and other audio signal source directly to the mixer. DI box function is to convert the unbalanced output of the guitar, keyboards and other musical instrument to balanced output. Connecting an unbalanced output to balanced input of the mixer often led to humming noise which is really unpleasant for ears especially when no one is playing the instrument.

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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.

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Clean Power Supply for Audio Application

Building a “hum-free” audio is not easy till you know what you are doing. It is not as easy as connecting wire into where it should be connected. Especially for grounds, if you connected it into wrong point. Noise usually come from ground loops or connecting a very sensitive signal ground line to a high current ground path. In most cases a star connection is very effective in eliminating the noise.

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DIY USB to DMX converter

DMX or DMX512 is short for Digital MultipleX(the number 512 represents the max number of channels), a communication protocol mainly made for lighting controls. It was introduced  in 1990’s and was developed by Engineering Commission of United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT). On that time, DMX512 is so expensive to design and implement. Only today with the advancement of technology, anyone can now develop their own DMX512 device.

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