One of the more famous pedal mods is the “Keeley Mod” that Robert Keeley used to do to the Boss BD-2. This modded pedal has been used by a number of great players including John Mayer which is how I’ve ended up here. Keeley no longer modify pedals, so you either have to go hunt down a used one, and they will only get more expensive, or you can get a Super Phat Mod, which is essentially a true bypass modded BD-2.

Being the person I am rather than buying an old pre-modified pedal I decided to buy a standard pedal used and modify it my self.

If you want to do this your self then there is one gotcha. A year or so ago (2018/9 ish) Boss changed from through hole to SMD components for the BD-2, which make this kind of mod impossible ¹. So hit eBay and look for an older pedal. The ones you want have the power jack in the middle of the back like below, not the ones where the jack runs along the base plate.

Older pedals with blue boxes will be fine, the change happened during the current black boxes so you can’t just go “black box is no good” as earlier ones will still be able to be modded.

Before we start: thanks to Ryan “The Tone Geek” who did most of this research and I am just following from his work and a few google searches.

The Kirkland Signature was/is a pedal made by Josh Scott at JHS Pedals for John Mayer in 2017. It was used on his pedal board up until sometime in 2019¹.

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A post shared by John Mayer 💎 (@johnmayer)

Earlier this year I was looking for a new pedal/electronics project and for some reason this came to mind.

Recently I’ve been working with KiCad to design some PCBs. On some of these I have added a small logo or mono image using the built in converter that comes with KiCad. This tool allows you to take any image, colour or mono, and convert it into something you can add to your PCB.

Whilst this works the tool isn’t great and does loose a significant amount of detail when converting things.

For a recent project I wanted to make a face plate using a PCB as it’s convenient, and should be pretty durable. Sadly the built in editor wasn’t giving me results I was happy with for something that will be much more visible than normal.

Some research found a tool called SVG2Mod ¹ which will convert an SVG into a .kicad_mod file that I can use.

The other week I bought a “spares or repair” Ibanez TS-5 Tube screamer from eBay for £25. It was described as “intermittent” so I expected this to either be an iffy switch, similar to my DL-5 delay, or maybe a broken solder joint to one of the jacks (including the power).

When the pedal arrived I gave it a thorough cleaning, as befitting our times though it also had 20+ years of grot on it. There was a battery inside to that expired in 2011 and had burst. Fortunately there was minimal damage to the battery clip.

On Friday 2nd October 2020 JHS launched their brand new 3 Series Pedal line. On the 7th October Josh, and the team, did a live stream for Sweetwater where they demoed these. During that stream Josh showed the schematics for all 7 of these new pedals and said the following:

Here's the schematic to this pedal. You can screenshot it, make it your self. We do not care.

So screen shot it I did, and so began my journey cloning a brand new pedal.

Whilst I love my PRS SE Standard 24 I have never really used the trem. Maybe it’s a lack of practice but I never found the results pleasing when more than a light touch is applied. If I want a light touch then just moving the neck has been plenty. The tremelo is also a floating design, which means it is a balancing act of string tension and spring tension, if you change either the setup goes to pot. This means no 1/2 step down or drop D with out it affecting the setup.

One fix is a fixed bridge guitar, I don’t have one. The other is to block the tremelo, which literally is a block of wood that stops the bridge closing. You then use extra spring tension to hold it in. Simple and very reversible.

All of this should be the same for any SE or CE tremelo model as they all use the same import bridge, possibly an S2 but I am not 100% on that one. It will also be the same for any floating trem but the details of dimensions etc will differ.

I’ve got a saved search setup on eBay where I keep an eye on cheap guitar pedals in case anything interesting comes up cheap. A couple of weeks ago an Ibanez Soundtank DL5 Digital delay came up for under £15 delivered, “untested”. This translated to works fine but the foot switch is broken so it’s stuck on.

The soundtank range was a budget range by Ibanez in the 90’s with a distinctive black plastic case. One promblem with them over time is the foot switches tend to die on them.

After some research I found replacements on SmallBear in the US. Given the current climate (2020 for future readers) I wanted to avoid ordering internationally and used the part number (ALPS SPPB512300) and found them on RS Components and I could collect 5 from a local branch.

In theory anyway, these actually came direct from Japan 🇯🇵 so were not ready next working day when I arrived. Kindly the store offered to send them on on arrival and save me having to go back. This was done free of charge and was most appreciated.

The ALPS switches are tiny and so it’s not overly surprising that they fail. RS describes them as a Detector Switch, so more in line with a micro switch than the 3PDT footswitch used by boutique builders.

I don’t normally post about my troops but this weekend was MCM Comic Con Birmingham. During our first patrol we were out near the entrance by the escalators from the trains. An MCM employee asked me to pose for a short video, and after a quick practice he took the shot and moved on.

When the end of day video was posted I figured I’d missed the cut.

However today they posted the end of con video and about halfway on is a very familiar trooper.

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That’s a wrap on MCM Comic Con 2019! ✨ #mcmcomiccon

A post shared by MCM Comic Con (@mcmcomiccon) on Nov 17, 2019 at 9:37am PST

One of the tools commonly used for wood working is the handplane. These come in a variety of sizes from only a few inches long to 60cm monsters weighing several kilos. Their purpose is to level and straighten wood and prepare it for jointing. It’s generally thought that some of the best are actually old vintage models made by Stanley or Bailey. These are readily available used and usually have plenty of life left in them. Once you clean them up that is.

This was my Dads plane. It’s a Stanley number 4, which is a middle size and a very handy one to have. It also had seen better days. The rear handle (called the tote) was broken, the metal work was all very rusted and the finish on the handles was flaking badly. It was time to restore it for use in some projects I have in mind for the future.

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to win a Boss Katana 50 amplifier. One of the features of the amplifer is channel presets which can be switched via a footswitch. The default option for this is a 2 button item, one switching channels the other swapping banks. This means sometimes to change to a given channel you will need to push 2 buttons to swap both bank and channel.

For the 100W versions a 4 button footswitch is available allowing direct access to 4 channels on each bank, this is my DIY attempt to build my own 4 button switcher for the Katana 50.

My idea was to use an Arduino to read the inputs of 4 momentary switches, and then use this to set the appropriate connections for the channel switching and also an LED to show which channel is selected.

An initial design was prototyped on a breadboard. I didn’t have enough switches at this point so wires were simply shorted together to act as switches. This needed some tweaking but after a while I had a working design. The Arduino firmware was also written at this point.

Once I had a working design I used a free application called KiCad to first create a schematic, and then a PCB design. This took a few attempts but the docs where pretty good and after following a few tutorials I was able to pick up enough to bumble my way through. I really enjoyed this stage and I hope to be able to use these skills again and build upon them in the future.