I want to share my next guitar-themed craft, as well as another attempt to use wood in the design of guitar pedals. This time I will talk about very simple, but nice sounding overdrive based on Electra Distortion.
Not many people have heard of it by that name, but it became the basis for the whole family of pedals such as Lovepedal Woodrow, EQD Speaker Cranker, EQD Grey Channel, Emerson EM-Drive, and many others. The original version of this circuit was built directly into the guitars produced by the Electra brand in the 70’s, and later appeared in a separate pedal format (Electra 600D).
Despite the very compact case, I decided to abandon the circuit board and used hinged mounting, because when everything is simple, it’s kind of uninteresting, isn’t it?)
For the overlay I used a 4mm thick plate of ophram, which was then ground down to 2mm so that the epoxy poured through the pattern.
It sounds quite light and transparent overdrive, very responsive to dynamics, and has some features of fuzz on certain settings. All in all, I highly recommend it for those who want to get a decent boost/overdrive for little money, or for those who want to try their hand at assembling pedals and don’t know where to start.
Well, you can see a little more details on the making, as well as examples of the sound in this video). I did the same thing on my CNC router machine.