Pedal Mods - input requested

[motterpaul]

Is anyone here modding pedals? Since I got to San Diego I have had people telling me there is a huge market for such a thing.

Yesterday a guy dropped off four pedals for "fixes":

SD-2 (Brent Mason Mod)

Maxon compressor (too noisy),

Love Pedal Eternity - change the IC for a cleaner sound.

DOD 280 - wants more compression with a longer attack time. I noticed the main difference is new ones have a different vactrol, an NS-32. There is also a 47uf cap that controls attack time where I can try different values.

Is anyone out there also doing a lot of mods, and is it easy? Do you have any problems finding the specs. Is there possibly a site that is dedicated to pedal mods?

[Beaker]

I have the Wampler pedal modding book - it's how I got into building from scratch.

Some of us have experience modding pedals. In theory, modding pedals is fairly straightforward - yank a few components, and replace them with different values or "better" parts, adding switches and LEDs etc.

In practice though, you will come up against the worst aspects of guitar cork sniffing snobbishness, mis-information and plain ignorance.

If you can smile and bite your tongue while someone tells you he wants some specific mojo capacitor fitting to a perfectly good pedal "because they sound so much better" (because he read it on the internet), you can make some reasonable money.

[motterpaul]

Beaker - you crack me up. I will have to look for that book.

Yeah - I know exactly what you mean, the TGP crowd of pedal snobbishness. The thing is that they read things, but they don't have the big picture (I already have heard about this). For example, he knew what a "red dot" Ge transistor was - sort of - but he didn't have any idea about the history of Ge Trannys.

He DID know that people order pedals to spec (like a red-dot Mullard fuzz tone) but that they don't understand there are big difference between any two Mullard OC75s. He did know that much. But he also  asked if I had any Ge OpAmps.

He wants his diodes replaced with LEDs (seems to be a pretty popular mod) although I personally prefer the sound of a standard diode (usually Si, or Ge in some cases).

But most of this work is just replacing switches or DC connectors.

[Muadzin]

I rarely do it anymore these days but I started doing Monte Allums mods to some of my Boss pedals. Later when I moved on to BYOC pedals they had pages full of interesting mods for them too.

I do like it that there are so many mods for commercial pedals out there. And that most of them are provided for free online. So many guitarists crave those boutique tones from their guitar heroes and the majority of them have no clue that with a few simple mods to their cheap commercial pedals they can have those tones as well. It's also boggles the mind to see that most of them would rather spend 2x to 3x as much on expensive boutique pedals rather then pick up a soldering iron. Or pay some dude a lot of money to do some soldering for them.

I blame the school system. Too much emphasis on academic knowledge based teaching, not enough on practical skills. It's good that people are prepared for higher education, but they should be prepared for daily life as well. Soldering a simple circuit should be something everybody should learn in school.

[2liveis2die]

Theres some good reading in the files section of DIY stompboxes(unofficial) on facebook