I’ve gotten a little sidetracked from my usual pickup and bass building. My 15-year-old nephew, who is learning to play guitar, wanted a stompbox. I figured it would be a fun surprise to build him a little distortion pedal.

Being more of a bass player, I’ve build plenty of envelope filters and preamps but I’m not really well-versed in the world of guitar-effects such as distortion, fuzz and overdrive. I asked around, and a few people recommended the Electra Distortion. After doing a little research, I built one up on the breadboard and added a Baxandall tone stack and a buffered recovery stage to the end of it. I upped the gain a little bit as well. It sounds really good!

Here’s a little clip:

I designed a little PCB board in Easy EDA and sent the files off to the fabricator. I should be getting those in a few weeks. In the meantime, I designed some graphics for the face of the pedal. I took an image from the Mexican Loteria game. The li’l lady is Mexican and friends and family come over all the time to play Loteria. She and my nephew’s side of the family consider themselves Native Americans, so my nephew will get a kick out of the artwork.

This is a really cool pedal. I’m really excited about this little side project. I can’t wait to see this one come together. I’ll have a couple extra boards as well, so I’ll probably build up all three pedals.