Dealing with a Crappy Pedal

After acquiring my first Boss imitation, that of an SD-1, I thought that all such pedals were actual replicas of their counterparts.  I was wrong.  I also read in one forum that Lazer/Century/Denio/Rockson and God-knows-what-else-it’s-called distortion pedals had a circuit that was designed just like this certain overdrive pedal.  Since I couldn’t find a schematic or layout diagram of the pedal, I decided to buy myself one of those for the fun of it.  I wanted to mod the pedal to practice my soldering and generally have a good time.

I couldn’t believe what I heard when I connected my newly acquired and badly battered Lazer distortion pedal between my guitar and my amp.  It terribly sucked tone!  Thinking that I would be appeased if I switched it on, I set all the knobs to 12 o’clock, turned the gadget on, and played a chord.  Man, I couldn’t describe the sound.  I couldn’t even determine what kind of sound it was.  There were highs and lows, but I couldn’t hear the sound of my guitar.  It sounded like noise.  Yes, that’s it, mostly distortion noise, very little guitar.

Tweaking the knobs didn’t help much.  Simply put, the Lazer distortion is one crappy pedal.  I couldn’t believe someone could design something like this.  The designer could’ve been partially deaf; maybe that person wasn’t even a guitar player or musician. If I may say so, this Lazer distortion pedal should be the subject of a product recall by the company if the company selling/marketing the pedal is concerned about its reputation at all.

Well, I had already thrown away 400 pesos for this piece of crap, but I’m not going to throw away the pedal.  I was determined to learn more about the pedal despite my extremely limited knowledge in electronics.  So I proceeded to open up the damned thing and check the layout.

I have to admit that trying to trace the circuit makes me dizzy and drives me to the threshold of insanity.  Hahaha.  The magnifying glass transports me to some kind of electronic Lilliput and Blefuscu, where I feel like an ant in a helicopter, trying to traverse the maze of capacitors, resistors, transistors, jumper wires, ICs, diodes, and the copper trace highways.

I saw a familiar landmark, the 4560 ICs; there were two of them.  Then I saw the clipping diodes.  My adrenaline started to pump me up and my heart began to beat a tad faster as I became more excited with the prospect of being able to change the sound of this mofo.  However, after seeing that the resistors were rated at 1/2 watts, my heart sank a bit. Anyway, I proceeded to change the clipping diodes and replaced one capacitor and one resistor for a simple mod that made my Lazer distortion pedal sound like — well, a distortion pedal.  Kidding aside, the pedal sounded like a distortion pedal and a fuzz box rolled into one.  The fuzz characteristic becomes more evident as you sustain a note.

I surfed and Googled, then found out a workaround for tone sucking pedals.  I also found out that true-bypass aren’t necessarily a good thing because connecting a number of them in series is like having a really long cord between the guitar and the amp, so you need to be able to individually disconnect them from the chain with a pedal looper or strip, or by using a buffer before or after the chain.  Anyway, more of that in some other post.

I found out that if you put a pedal with a low-impedance output before the tone-sucking pedal, it will improve your clean sound because it helps to maintain the right impedance throughout the chain.  It also means that the pedal before Tone Sucker has a good buffer similar to that of Boss pedals.  One can also use a looper or fabricate/purchase a buffer and connect it either at the beginning or at the end of the chain.  I chose the more practical solution; I knew that my first Boss imitation pedal had a nice clean sound with the effect off, so I connected it before Tone Sucker.  Yes!  Crystal clear clean guitar tone was finally coming out of my amp.