World Shaking!

On a short break between classes I decided to work on a DIY kit that would help me practice soldering and circuit building. I chose the Build Your Own Clone Tremolo Kit. I love the sound for surf guitar and thought it might add some diversity to my guitar playing as well.

In the kit was a PCB board, wires and components, and the enclosure and knob covers. Included in the above gallery are work in progress pics of the PCB board and soldering connections (the layout of the board required soldering on both sides). The enclosure was not painted and therefore I got to design the pedal to my liking. World Shaking is the power move that Sailor Uranus from Sailor Moon uses, and I felt it an apt name for a tremolo pedal. Her color scheme is Navy Blue and Yellow/Gold and I stuck with something similar to that.

The VERY last step was to check out the pedal to see if it worked. It sounds perfect: the depth knob changes the range of pitch modulation and can be very subtle to highly pronounced, the rate knob gives you a wide variation between slow pulsation to faster vibrations, and the volume pedal is how hot your signal is overall.

These kits are a blast and I might turn this into a semi-regular thing in the name of awesome sound and soldering practice.