Thursday, July 17, 2008

I made a toy into a guitar pedal



I went to Cracker Barrel a few days ago and among the balsa wood airplanes and lawn ornaments, I came across a red toy megaphone that has switches to change your voice when you talk into it. High and low pitch shift and "alien voice" which makes it monotone and warbley. It made for some pretty interesting sounds, so I got it and decided to see what could be done with it. I stayed pretty tame with it, just adding an input and output jack, a power switch so you don't have to hold it on, and a speaker cutoff switch. The sampling is so slow that anything that goes through it is bitchrushed pretty well. I might put it into a pedal like thing or I might leave it as is. WHO KNOWS!!?!?!




Update 1:

I decided to make the guitar pedal style case for it. I looked up the size of a normal pedal, roughly went with that. A couple hours and a couple dozen dremel cut-off wheels later I'd taken the lid of an old server case that had a nice baked on paint and turned it into a rough pedal case. It actually makes for rather nice project cases, and I'll probably make a post on how to make them some time. If you have old computer cases or any thin, flat sheet metal around it's very easy. Anyway, there's a photo of it as it stands right now on the right.

Being as I still need a proper stomp switch to cut it on and off I'll have to get back to finishing it later, but for now you get the idea. I'll probably get a DPDT switch if I can and see if it can be wired to either feed the signal through the pedal or around it since the circuit doesn't do that on it's own.

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