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Archive for March, 2010

Modding the DS-1 – part 3 – have I gone too far?

Friday, March 26th, 2010

DS-1 Stage 3 mods - knob head!

After my second stage of modifications I had found that my pedal was sounding absolutely amazing, especially as an overdrive for my amp’s dirty channel. However, I wasn’t completely happy with the the range on the tone knob. I went from extremely thick and bassy, to just in the range I would want o set my tone to. I wanted to see if I could replace a couple of components somewhere to give me the ability to set my preferred tone setting to somewhere around the middle of the dial.

I did some searching on the ‘net for any solutions to my problems, and found some information relating to the resistors taking care of the tone control, and using pots in place of them to gain variable control on the tonal palette.

So I decided that my third stage of mods to the DS-1 was to remove the resistors related to the tone stage of the pedal, and replace them with 2 10K matching value pots to give the ability to shape the curve of the tone knob.

My first test was adding two cheap trim pots in place of the resistors that I could just shove in the casing after tweaking. I had found some success with this method, and I was able to tweak the tone stage so that my preferred setting was around 12 o’clock on the tone knob.

My next step was to actually install 2 pots on the outside of the pedal so I could alter the tone to suit whatever guitar I was playing. I picked up two 9mm 10K pots, and a drill bit to drill through the case so I could install them.

There is not a lot of room in the DS-1 for installing extra pots so I was going to have to “uglify” the pedal a bit to install the two pots. I ended up choosing the top side of the pedal, either side of the AC adapter port. I figured that then the new controls wouldn’t get in the way of other pedals when on a pedal board.

Measure twice, cut once, whoops!

Now there is a saying, something along the lines of “measure twice, cut once”. This is perhaps something I should have done when it came to drilling the holes for the new pots.

I measured the spots to drill, and there was plenty of clearance for the pot to fit, so I drilled and that was where I realised my mistake. I had forgotten about the screw points for the base plate in each corner. As a result I couldn’t get the pot in far enough to be able to screw on the nut.

So I measured up again, and this time successfully managed to install the new pots behind the stock ones. I did have to pull out the stock ones in order to get them in.

Unfortunately it was at this point when I found some more problems. My stock tone knob seemed to be doing very little, and the new pots weren’t quite doing what they were when there were just little trim pots installed. I tried rewiring it all again, and at that point accidentally took the solder base off one of the resistor points. I write out the wire glue and put it all together, and still didn’t really have any success. Things seemed a bit worse again.

I decided to remove the new pots, and install the original resistors again, with the hope that I’d get the pedal back to my stage two mods. I was unable to get any winning results though as my tone knob still wasn’t reacting properly, plus the level seemed to be failing too.

Looks like I have a bit of troubleshooting ahead of me. I hope I can manage to work out how to fix the problems I have.

I’m kind of wishing that I held off the stage 3 mods until I had a new more accommodating enclosure where I could fit the new pots more comfortably.

Wish me luck!

Tags: Boss, Distortion, DS-1, mod, modifying, Pedal
Posted in DIY, Effects | 2 Comments »

Modding the Boss MT-2

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Powerful blue LED indicates modified goodness.

The Boss MT-2 Metal Zone distortion pedal is well known as a high gain, but very sterile sounding pedal. It’s good for bedroom metal, but not much else.

I had a Boss MT-2 Metal Zone distortion pedal sitting around so I thought I might see if I can make the pedal a bit more organic, and full sounding.

I did a search online for any interesting MT-2 mods and stumbled upon a thread on freestompboxes.org on Boss Metalzone MT2 mods.

I decided to try out the “Diezel mod listed in the thread. The modifications are as follows:

Diezel mod:

C35: remove
C34: 0.047uF MKT Capacitor
C25: remove

These three mods remove the harshness somewhat.

C42: 1uf MKT Capacitor
D3: Red LED
D4: 1n4001 diode

This makes the sound more dynamic and full.

C36: 0.1uf MKT Capacitor

This makes the EQ more useful.

Modified Boss MT-2 PCB. Red LEDs make a huge difference.

So I made these changes, and found that the tone of the pedal was a little more organic than stock, but the distortion was still a bit too over the top. I decided to replace the 1n4001 diode with another red LED.

This change made a huge difference! There was a drop in the distortion available in the pedal, but what was left was much fatter and chunky. Don’t get me wrong, there is still enough dirt after the mod for big metal sounds, it’s just a lot bigger and thicker.

The pedal is still probably best for scooped metal sounds, as long as you don’t go silly with scooping the mids too much. Setting the mids at about 12 o’clock, and the low and highs between 4 and 5 o’clock, with the mid freq at 1 to 2 o’clock gave a nice modern metal tone without too much scooping going on.

The changes have also resulted in the MT-2 being a really good overdrive as well. I switched over to the dirty channel on my Blackstar HT-5, rolled the Dist knob back to zero, and adjusted the Level knob and found a beautiful, fat tone to accentuate my dirty channel. Best of all it doesn’t sound to blubbery either, it’s fat, but still nice and sharp around the edges.

So now my Boss MT-2 is far better sounding, but it still retains it’s modern scooped metal sound, albeit a far more organic real sounding one. I believe this pedal would sound a lot better as the basis for distorted guitar tones in a band setting than the stock pedal. The added benefit of a fat overdrive to boost an already distorted amp is fantastic too.

I’ll hopefully record some basic samples over the next day or so and upload them.

————–

Since this article was written I’ve made some more progress with my MT-2 mods. Check out my part 2 post for my updated mod list. I believe this is a far better sounding MT-2 modification.

Tags: Boss, DIY, Metal Zone, mod, modify, MT-2
Posted in DIY, Effects | 9 Comments »

New Gear Day (NGD): Daphon E20OD Overdrive pedal

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Daphon E20OD Overdrive = cheap thrills

Since I’ve started modifying stomp boxes I’ve been on the lookout for cheap second hand pedals to tinker with. Then I stumbled on to Daphon’s range of cheap pedals.

Costing a lot less than a lot of second hand pedals I thought why not give them a go. I had read online that the Daphon E10OD and E20OD had got quite favourable reviews from people online.

It was discovered that these overdrive pedals had the same chip as the famous Ibanez TS-9 Tubescreamer. In fact Daphon built the old Ibanez “Soundtank” series of pedals back in the early nineties, which had a Tubescreamer in the range.

I figured with these things in mind it might be a worthwhile venture picking up one, and working on it. And hey, if I break it I’m not out that much money anyway!

I chose the E20D out of the two because it came with more solid components to work with. The “10″ series Daphon pedals share a similar shaped enclosure to the old Ibanez “Soundtank” series, which I assumed also came with the garbage pots and jacks too.

The E20OD has a trio of regular pots, and the rest of the hardware definitely looks to be decent enough.

So it seems to be built quite solidly, but how does it sound?

Plugging in the E20OD I was greeted with a familiar trio of controls, and dialling up a decent overdrive tone wasn’t too hard. I’ll spend a bit more time testing it out before I write a proper review. Then after that it will be time to hack it up and hopefully create something special out of this cheap pedal.

Tags: Daphon, E10OD, E20OD, modify, Overdrive, TS-9
Posted in General, NGD | No Comments »

Agile Partners Tab Toolkit – review

Friday, March 19th, 2010

A pretty cool application for the iPhone. Imagine how aweseome it would be on the iPad.

Agile Partners have come up with a great little application for the iPhone. Tab Toolkit offers guitar players a useful tool for storing guitar tab files, viewing them, and playing them through the iPhone speaker or headphones for reference.

Tab Toolkit allows you to load tab files, include Power Tab, Guitar Pro, PDF and text based tabs. Only the Power Tab and Guitar Pro files can be played back through the audio system in Tab Toolkit. The others are available just as references to read.

Version 1 of Tab Toolkit was only capable of playing one instrument at a time. Agile Partners have rectified this though with version 1.1. If you held back from purchasing Tab Toolkit because of this worry no longer.

The tab listing part of Tab Toolkit is nicely done, with three different modes. You can have alphabetical lists by artist, and when you click on the artist it takes you to all of the tabs in your repository. You can view all tabs alphabetically, or tabs listed by artist, with every tab listed underneath the artist heading. The later is my favourite view.

There are two ways of downloading your tab repository to Tab Toolkit. You can load them from your PC using your iPhones IP address, or you can download them from the web using the inbuilt web browser. Each are nice and easy to use, particularly the nice web based interface.

One thing I felt was missing is the capability to print tabs off over WiFi to printer. This would make Tab Toolkit a very powerful application. I teach guitar, and if I was showing my repository of tabs to students, and they wanted a copy of one of them I’d love to just tell them to fire up their printer so I could print it off for them. I have sent through a suggestion to Agile Partners to see if they could add this capability to a future release.

Overall Tab Toolkit is a handy application for guitar players. It is a great tool, giving you access to your tab collection anywhere, plus allowing you to find and be able to read tab files on the go. I’d love to see what Agile Partners do with Tab Toolkit when the iPad is released. An expanded version with a page per screen tabs would be amazing!

Tags: Guitar Pro, iPhone, midi playback, Power Tab, review, Tab, Tab Toolkit, Tablature
Posted in iPhone, Reviews | No Comments »

Modding the Boss CS-3

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

My Stock Boss CS-3 ready to mod.

After my successful attempt to modify my old Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal I thought I would have a go at making my Boss CS-3 Compression/Sustainer a quieter pedal when sustain levels are set high. I found some resources at Indy Guitarist on the Boss CS-3, and how to lower the noise and hiss levels of the pedal, as well as alter the tone of the pedal.

I decided to try out the modifications to lower the noise level, which involved swapping out four electrolytic capacitors and replacing them with some sort of metal film or film capacitors of the same value. I also decided change out two resistors that affected the pedal’s clean headroom and added more ‘body’ to the tone.

For ultimate mod cred I would also replace the standard red ‘on’ LED with a blue one.

I ended up using 1uF tantalum capacitors in place of the 1uF electrolytic ones. The voltage rating on the electrolytic types were 50Volts, but the highest 1uF tantalum capacitors I could find in my local electronics store were 35V.

I determined that these should be fine for my application. The pedal is designed to run on a 9Volt battery or power supply, so as long as the capacitors I was using had a Voltage rating of at least double that (18Volts) I should be well and truly safe seeing as I had plenty of headroom from the 35Volts.

With regards to the resistors I was replacing two tiny 10K resistors with larger 470Ohm and 100Ohm metal film ones.

I decided that I would start on replacing the LED. When I did my DS-1 mods I found it one of the most painful parts, so I thought I would get it out of the way.

Accessing the LED's mini PCD.

The LED has it’s own little mini PCB, separate to the main one. It’s a little fiddly unscrewing it from it’s mounting point, but that’s not the real issue. Trying to de-solder the points the LED attached to is extremely fiddly due the PCBs tiny size. i found that I could screw it to one of the corners of the base of the pedal to keep it a little more stable. Whilst doing this makes things a lot easier, it’s still a tough one to work on.

The solder also seems to be very built up on the LED. Maybe it’s just my cheap 25W soldering iron, but it takes a very long time to remove enough of the solder off the board and the LED legs to slide the LED out. Be careful during this that you don’t take too much off, and lift the points completely. I noticed a little of the brown base where I had been a bit overzealous with my soldering iron and de-solder braid, but i still had plenty left once I had removed the original LED to replace with the new shiny blue one.

Remember that LEDs are polarised, meaning that they have a set negative and positive leg. Typically polarized electronics commonly have a longer leg for the positive side, but the LED I bought seemed to have identical length legs. I just slide the LED into the holes on the PCB, bend the legs enough to touch the edges of the holes, and test with a power supply and cable plugged in the input. If the light doesn’t come on then the alignment is wrong and you need to swap the LED around. Once the alignment is sorted solder the LED in place and test to make sure the light comes on.

CS-3 with it's new blue LED.

At this point I’ll say that it’s definitely a great idea to test your pedal after each change is made. Don’t chop any of the components legs until you are sure that you have it installed correctly, and the pedal is operating when engaged. Once you have successfully tested it chop the legs down to the solder points.

Now it was time to move on to the capacitors. Some capacitors are polarised, and some aren’t. It is extremely important that you determine if the capacitors you are replacing are, and ensure that your replacements are as well.

The electrolytic capacitors being replaced are polarised, and this is marked by a stripe down one side of the capacitor, indicating the negative side. Thankfully with BOSS PCBs they show on the PCB the negative point by putting a white circle around the negative hole.

As mentioned with the LEDs, many polarised items will have a longer leg on the positive side, but not always. The tantalum capacitors I was using to replace the electrolytic have a ‘+’ sign to indicate the positive side. Ensure that that this side of the capacitor is going in to the hole WITHOUT the circle around it for correct alignment. If you incorrectly align the capacitor it could very well blow. Something you definitely don’t want happening!

The capacitors you want to replace for this mod are the c4, c6, c14, and c17. Thankfully most Boss pedals have each component clearly marked out with this numbering system.

Replace each electrolytic capacitor with the tantalum equivalent one at a time, testing after each solder to ensure the pedal is still working. If it’s not working properly (and the capacitor hasn’t been installed around the wrong way) the chances are the solder hasn’t bonded properly with the component and the PCB. A solid, correctly soldered point should be nice and shiny, whereas a bad solder point will be quite dull. If it’s bad then head the solder up again, and add some more if needed.

The CS-3's stock PCB and...

After installing all four new capacitors you should find that your pedal sounds pretty much the same as it did originally, with less noise and hiss.

I then removed the R5 10k resistor, and put in it’s place a 470Ohm one. Resistors are not polarised, so you can install them in either way.

Installing the new item was a bit of a challenge as it is a bit bigger than the original item. The resistor is longer than the space between the two holes, which means you need to bend one leg a bit so the resistor sticks up on a bit of an angle. Just take care not to break the legs when doing this.

I then followed up with replacing the R36 10K resistor with a 100Ohm replacement. It is the same size as the 470Ohm one, so again it’s just a matter of carefully bending the legs a bit so the resistor is raised off the PCB a bit.

After installing the resistors I packed the PCB back into the enclosure and bolted on the bottom of the pedal, ready to take the pedal for a test drive.

... the completed modifications.

The modified CS-3 does sound a little quieter on higher level and sustain settings. The tone also seems to be a bit richer and fuller too, thanks to the resistor changes.

Overall it has a more pleasing tone to the ears, it’s not a noticeably different sounding pedal, but the modifications seem to have had a positive impact to the pedal.

Below are links to samples of the CS-3 mods in action. My recording configuration is a little basic, with the direct out on my Blackstar HT-5 plugged in to the audio in port of my PC’s soundcard. The samples are a little rough sounding, but I hope they give you an idea of what the pedal sounds like.

The first sample is through the clean channel of my amp, and the second sample is through the dirty channel. Both samples have pretty much the same settings on the CS-3.

Please excuse my rough playing as well. I didn’t seem to pick the best day to record my guitar playing abilities (or lack thereof)!

CS-3 mod clean demo

CS-3 mod dist demo