Amidst my recent pedal buying spree I shortly woke up from the comforts of a newly gained habit and contemplated. Where to go next? What’s left to discover, now that I played the goddamn intro to My Iron Lung the way it’s meant to sound? So I began to explore the depths of my soul the way reasonable people do: I started a 3-day YouTube binge.
I came to observe: A crapload of people are building their own guitar pedals. And they pretty much sound like the real thing, if that’s what you’re after. I thought: I might want to build one myself, you know, going for depth instead of breadth. Plus, it would be nice to create stuff with my own hands, instead of just buying something from The Internet. Then I watched a lot of videos like this one, where people solder themselves a pedal in 5 minutes and the like. But soon I realized I must have wiped every memory of physics lessons from my brain.
After watching some theory videos on electronics I could not really connect the dots. I decided to get into this stuff for real. So I bought a starter kit:
The first experiment consisted of pushing the contacts of a resistor (the stripey things, and boy, are they small) against the poles of the battery casing. Resistor was supposed to get warm, or even hot, as a warning said. Which makes sense, as resistors resist by transforming power into heat. I sure didn’t overdo it and called it a pass when I had the slightest sensation of warmth.
The second experiment involved a motor. Now I had to close the circuit with some provided cables, none of which is yellow or green, btw, Das Franzis Lernpaket box designers. Worked as expected, the motor did stuff. Then they instructed me to reverse the flow (red cable on minus, black cable on plus), so the motor would rotate the other way round. To make direction assessment more fun, I mounted a… kind of rotor onto the motor. This is my first creation as an electrical engineer. I call it The Helicopter. It even flew a bit. Actually wants to fly so hard, I had to shoot the video a few times because it took off.
Anyway, maybe I’m onto something here. Tomorrow, an LED will be lit up. Diodes! You can distort shit with diodes. This guy did. This person teaches us how to modify that fuzz to make it sound worse. Maybe you could make it sound better, who knows, seems like you really can do anything.