I’ve always been fascinated by DIY electronics, and I always wished I knew more about how to solder and build your own musical effects.

After reducing my music gear to the very basic minimum I found myself wanting to experiment with some interesting sounds for my guitar, and what better chance to roll your own?

Finding veroboard pedal layouts online was easy, so I picked out a simple distortion circuit as a starting point.

Below is the schematic I made from the board:

This is actually my first schematic ever so bear with me :).

Based on this schematic I breadboarded the design:

This is working. Sort of. The signal comes through and sounds somewhat distorted, but the difference compared to the clean signal is very small.

Next step will be to figure out if I need a different capacitor configuration or a different transistor in order to drive more distortion…

If you have any thoughts please share them :).