On Saturday I attended a three-hour IEEE guitar effects pedal building workshop here at the university. I paid $50, and was given a slew of parts (primary, around 10 resistors, 5 capacitors, a diode, a pcb, four potentiometers, an led, two audio cable jacks, a dc jack, four knobs, a pushbutton switch, and a metal case), then we worked for three hours in an Everitt Lab classroom at assembling the thing. A couple of months ago, I invested in a good quality set of equipment for working on such projects, and probably should have brought these to the workshop, because the given tools were less than ideal (obviously they weren’t going to buy everyone a $100+ soldering iron, as we were only paying for the parts). This and the fact that we were working in a crowded classroom with tiny, angled desks meant that I only got about half of the thing soldered and wired up in the three hours of the workshop. Later, I finished the remaining half in under an hour back at home.

Despite this, I’m really pleased with the result. I’ve owned around a dozen effects pedals throughout the past eight years (since I’ve been playing guitar), and this one has one of the nicest — if not the nicest — sounds, and feels very sturdy. The latter is great, as I’ve smashed about half of my old, plastic-case pedals. As for the former, the guys running the workshop claimed to have tested this pedal against the $120 Electro-Harmonix Metal Muff, and said that theirs easily sounds better. I’m not a big fan of the metal sound (and I’ve never used the Metal Muff), but playing around with the pedal earlier today, I was able to get a crisp distortion to it that I think will fit nicely with the kind of stuff that I do like to play. Finally, I named the pedal “THE CRUSHN8R,” after the robot from Futurama of the same name (”A woman that fine needs to be romanced.”), and in reference to the “crushing” distortion sound of the pedal itself. If I find some time later, I’ll post a sound clip of the pedal in action.