GUITAR EFFECTS PEDALS

One of my hobbies is playing guitar—through that hobby, I developed an interest in pedals, which allow you to manipulate the sound of your electric guitar with various effects (e.g. reverb, delay, chorus, distortion, etc.). After accumulating a small collection of purchased effects pedals, I began to build my own. This allows me to emulate circuitry of famous pedals and design custom artwork. Below is a sampling of pedals that I have built.

“A WILD SHEEP CHASE” - OVERDRIVE PEDAL

The “A Wild Sheep Chase” pedal is based upon the Klon Centaur overdrive pedal. The Klon Centaur has a bit of a cult following due to the small number of units that were made (by hand) and its use by many influential guitar players. The version that I built separates the overdrive and boost circuits such that these effects can be controlled independently (the original Klon combined these circuits so that it was impossible to get just boost on a clean tone or just overdrive). The original pedal featured (as-named) an image of a centaur. I wanted to play off of that half-human/half-animal theme, so I based my artwork design on the Sheep Man—a character that appears in a number of books by my favorite author, Haruki Murakami.

“CAT DISTORTION” - DISTORTION PEDAL

The “CAT Distortion” pedal is based on the circuitry of “The RAT” distortion pedal, which was heavily used in the early 1980s punk scene as well as by acts such as R.E.M, Pavement, and Weezer. It features a picture of my cat, Kumiko, that I took on my Fujifilm X100T and then manipulated into a graphic within Adobe Illustrator. I wanted the design to look playful/childish so I used different color for each control knob. The toggle switch allows the clipping option to change between silicon, LED, and germanium diodes.