Original effects with schematics, layouts and instructions, freely contributed by members or found in publications. Cannot be used for commercial purposes without the consent of the owners of the copyright.
Original Tracer Layouts A collection of original layouts for vintage guitar effects. If you want to build real replica's of vintage pedals, this is the forum you want to look at.
This page tries to keep the available projects indexed.
If you want to share files to build a effect that's not yet (widely) available, it would be a pleasure for us to host it here.
The projects should be verified , though, and at least contain a schematic , some layout file (transfer, vero, perf) and a component layout file .
Incomplete or unverified projects will be moved to the Projects in Progress folder: if you fall upon such a project, please report the...
For a long time I've felt guilty that my pedal board didn't include a compressor. Finally, after about a year of breadboarding, I have produced a circuit that can take on a Dynacomp and win , boasting:
Up to five times more headroom than a Dynacomp
Less noise than a Dynacomp
Same available sustain as a Dynacomp
Fewer parts than a Dynacomp
Cheaper than a Dynacomp
Feedforward side chain
Possibility for all five controls
Fits in 1590B
Millennium bypass
This has NOT been verified yet. I will post again to verify once the boards arrive.
Okay, so this is a very simple almost-5W chip amp using the TEA2025 IC. It's cheap and readily available, and it can run on +9V (which works out great for pedal guys). Okay, technically it's 4.7W running in bridged mono with a speaker load of 8 ohms. But 5W has a nicer sound to it, marketing-wise.
I don't think it will need a heat sink because four of the pins only connect to ground, which probably means they...
Hello. I'm running out of ideas for bass pedals, so I thought I'd come up with something. In principle, I wanted it to be on field-effect transistors 2n7000, and not on operational amplifiers. As a result, the pedal received 4 controls and one switch (it controls the midrange cut). There is also an opportunity to amplify the clean signal to some extent - this is present in the video.
I recently built a Boss CE1 clone with all original transistor types except for one sub which is the KSA992 for the 2sa493. I used the UA726 TA7136 to TL071 adapters with TL071s installed. 1458 for the the LFO and the DIY synth MN3002 to TDA1022 adapter board. The rate LED works in both vibrato and chorus mode. The Peak LED works properly. High low switch works properly, but I only get a clean guitar signal in bypass and effect mode. I get very little guitar signal when I use the stereo output...
Hi to all. I wanted to make some kind of guitar overdrive or distortion on 2n7000 field effect transistors again, but the power supply should be 18V - so the sound is more dynamic. And something like this came out after some modifications:
Hi folks
Here is my latest offering to the community - a revised version of my LA2A style optical limiter.
this time I have built it on one board (board is flipped too).
One thing i noticed when I powered this from a small 500ma 9v switch mode power pack, was a very loud white noise. At first I thought I had a noisy op amp but this was not the case. The solution was to replace the polarity protection diode with a 100 ohm resistor and decouple the output side with a 220uf electrolytic to ground...
Happy New Year to all the good folks here at freestompboxes.org.
Here is a new design that I have been working on over the last few years - a pedal designed to mimic the performance of a typical negative feedback tube amp power stage driving a Celestion quad box or similar.
The pedal has the negative feedback presence and depth (resonance) controls typical of Soldano, Marshall, Fender, Peavey etc.
Tube power amplifiers have a high output impedance compared to solid state class AB and digital...
I like to try to find effects where there aren't many DIY offerings and come up with something. Dimension chorus is like that. There's the DC-2 clones and the Dimension P and that's about it. I repaired a Boss CE-5 a little while ago, which introduced me to the ES56028S chip that Boss now uses in all their modern chorus pedals. I use two of these instead of BBD's and ditched the companders of the DC-2, while using it's basic LFO architecture. Features include:
So I breadboarded an Escobedo Push-Me-Pull-You the other day, and while it gives a decent octave up the fuzz was kind of weak (at least, on my breadboarded version).
So I says to myself, let's drop that gain control. Nuthin' good happening under max anyway.
Then I says to myself, what happens if we replace that feedback resistor with a diode, say a white LED? Well, what happens is that first stage becomes a bazz fuss and you get that glorious BF sound pushing (and pulling?) the octave...
I built a fuzz face replica for a friends dad about a year ago, built into a classic round enclosure, wired like the originals. It’s a silicon type, NPN. Hfe values were in the 300s if I remember correctly. Transistor type was a Telefunken BC107.
Anyway, he reached out to me recently to tell me that he loves the pedal but has experienced a strange issue that arises when the pedal is physically placed on his pedal board. The fuzz is after a...
Here is the second installment of my bass amplifier series - the Ampeg SVT in 9v pedal friendly format.
Plug this pedal into any high wattage power amplifier and experience the Super Valve Technology sound without tubes :wink:
This design is based on the original Ampeg SVT but with the 5 frequency bands mid boost / cut rotary switch used in the later SLM MkII model.
I left the bass cut option in the ultra bass switch control out as well just as they did in the MkII :wink: However I modeled the...
I have a long secret relationship with cab sims. I'm talking about analog cab sims, the ones that aren't anything more than a very specific equalizer. I know that digital and IR cab sims exist and are very popular, and can account for other characteristics of a guitar loudspeaker, but those are both outside my interests and my capabilities. I think a glorified filter can be very effective indeed for playing without a speaker and a microphone, quietly or not, and surely its hardware, being...
After showing you a couple of not-clones, here's a more original circuit I'm proud of. It's a parametric mid frequency eq with also bass and treble controls.
I think equalizers are very very powerful effects, altough they shouldn't be overestimated when post production is an option. Usually diy-ing a graphic eq is hindered by the amount of controls needed for a decent amount of bands, being them pots or worse, sliders. So I wanted to look for an alternative, and one which didn't feel like a...
I found my original, 1970s one-of-a-kind little homemade phaser when I was rummaging around for some leads the other night. There were two prototypes built of this one - the first one with a pair of 4558s and the second using a RC4136 quad op-amp. There were three more made (since they worked pretty well) using LM324. The first ones were built on Vero stripboard, then the LM324 versions were on perfboard. These days, I'd use a more modern quad op-amp (possibly even a TL074 - must try that) to...
I was wondering, does anyone have a schematic for the basic circuit EMG uses in their active pickups? It looks like it would be a hard trace since it's totally encapsulated in epoxy, but maybe someone has a factory scheme?
I've been looking at their website, and it seems like they give enough basic info to be able to reverse engineer a workalike. I'm gonna start messing with it this weekend. I have this idea for a project I want to do about DIY EMG-ing a passive pickup to work like an EMG. I...
A few months ago, I got the idea of reworking the Big Muff in a modern fashion, using op amps, while remaining true to the logic behind the original. The op amp muff is a cool circuit but deviates substantially from the original (I don't think anyone would say they are the same) and for one thing, the tone and volume control attached passively at then end don't thrill me. The logic behind the original muff is simple: an amplifier, two clipping stages, a tone control and a recovery stage. How...
Here are the complete build files for my Deluxe Micro Man. I will do my best to support questions here, but the best way to get through to me is at my website,
Deluxe Micro Man Rev A
Guts: (Note: for those building this, the 15VDC regulator should have it's heat sink tab trimmed and it should lay flat across the bridge diodes, which is harder to do if its installed standing up. This is NOT reflected in the picture below)
this is the project for the Tech21 Sansamp Classic, the big brother of the Sansamp GT2 (which you can find on
It features more tone options as the GT2, such as:
mid booost 1, mid boost 2, bass drive, clean amp, bright switch, vintage tubes, speaker edge and close miking on-off switches;
and of course the slide preset switch for marshall, mesa and fender style sounds.
in the zip file you'll find mine verified layout for perfboard and the PnP pcb, a wiring schem, the schem itself and the .diy...
A long time ago in this very same galaxy, i did a pedal called the Glorious Basstar:
It's a very very very cool multiband bass overdrive, but it's 8 knobs is kind of a no go for a lot of people.
So I went back to the drawing board and made a 4 knobs version called the Small Basstar. It has less possibilities, but still plenty. And it sound as big as it's bigger sister.
You can find a longer description on my website:
It looks like that:
So there is a kit version, and here's everything...
This is my first post here. I wanted to share the schematic for the Lone Wolf Audio Left Hand Wrath that I recently traced. Big surprise it was nothing remotely original, as it was an almost direct copy of the Dunwich Modded HM-2. I did add a CLR and polarity protection diode. Also, this works 100% using a One Spot for 9v power. The LWA LHW did not utilize a V+ or G- plane, Simply, it is a f'in mess.
FYI the trace image was not 100% complete, as I realized what it was mid-process and...
Hi everyone,
I am new on this forum and I thought it could be nice to share the selfmade schematic of my old Guyatone PS-015 Over Drive which sounds fantastic!
As you may see, big part of it is related to the electronig switching system which can be easily replaced by a mechanic mechanic 3PDT with true bypass configuration.
I didn't build it up yet so I cannot guarantee that the schematic is 100% faulty free.
If somebody have comments or finds mistakes, please let me know.
Schematic_Guyatone...
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