Adventures in Pedal Modding 2: Hitting the First Wall

Adventures in pedal modding 2: hitting the first wall

A while back I thought I’d do a post for fun about my foray into the world of effect pedal modding. The first mod was a success, but in all fairness was a simple capacitor swap to give my Ibanez TS-7 tube screamer some more low-end response. It’s been a while since I’ve updated things beyond that because well, with the next mod I ended up hitting a wall that I’ve been trying different ways around for months.

I found a mod online that was supposed to be a “boiled down Analogue-man silver mod” that only required three component changes. If you’re not familiar with Analogue-man he does pedal upgrades that go up by quality and price. (silver, gold, platinum, etc.) It was a bit more extensive as far as taking the pedal part to get to the boards, but it still should have gone simply enough if I had just been careful…

What you see here is a good example of impatience. I used my solder sucker pen to desolder the component, but didn’t have any braid handy to suck up the last excess bit to easily remove the component. I stupidly tried to persuade it a little bit with pliers and ended up cracking and chipping the board right there, killing the circuit. I looked up some ways to fix the broken pad or jump it to the next solder point but so far all my efforts have been in vain. I once briefly completed the circuit by using a spare piece of wire to connect the broken trace but the signal only stayed for a moment. I gotta say it was a pretty cool moment though because when I tested it I temporarily got this glitchy fuzz that I had certainly never heard out of this pedal before. I still don’t understand how that happened, but oh well.

Since then the circuit has been dead, the pedal gets power, but no sound. Since the pedal was free I can’t say it was a great loss if I don’t get it fixed, although it would have been nice to have around. Lesson learned: if the component doesn’t fall right out, take your time and press some wick on there. Don’t try to push/pull it out!

Adventures in Pedal-Modding Pt. 1

In my thirteen years of playing bass I’ve never been too knowledgeable about gear, which is something that I’ve found takes a really long time to change. It’s certainly not an overnight process, and it wasn’t until last year that I learned enough about effects pedals that I started to become fascinated with how they work and how I might be able to make modifications to them. I’m as green as they come when it comes to electronics so I took baby steps, first brushing back up on my soldering on some spare boards while I tried to figure out which pedals I might want to mod.

It just so happened that around the time I was beginning to get serious about this idea last year a friend of mine gave me an Ibanez TS-7 that he simply wasn’t using anymore. The TS-7 is one of the tone-lock Tubescreamer pedals that run on the cheaper side than the classic Tubescreamers and 808s.  Late last year I ran across a mod online that was supposed to increase the pedal’s bass response. I like the clear midrange of this pedal when played on both guitar and bass, but I figured that a simple mod to the make the pedal more bass friendly would be a good place to start. My thinking was this it might respond differently to bass so I wouldn’t get as much of the harsh, high-end noise that I was getting when playing my Spector through it, and if I messed anything up, it was free. It was a simple capacitor switch so I was able to do the mod pretty easily and I recorded the results.

I have to apologize for the poor video quality. When getting a Windows phone I didn’t think through the whole not being compatible with a Mac thing, and since I took the videos with my phone I had send the videos to my email in the worst quality. I think I’ve found a way past that for next time, but you can hear a little difference in tone. The next mod I have planned is a good deal more extensive and will require me taking pretty much the whole pedal apart. It’s a stripped down version of the Analogman Silver mod and I’m mostly just doing it for experience and experimentation. I’ve had fun with this so far and I hope any other pedal modders/builders out there (even beginners like me) will share their experiences here. Thanks for reading!