First Attempts...

I haven't been able to go toy-hunting yet, so thought I'd start out this weekend by ripping apart some of my old and un-used guitar pedals. A few might be interesting to try and hack; others I might just use to scavenge some parts. Some have incredibly simple ciruits, so I thought I'd look through them to remind myself what all the different components look like. Here's a distortion pedal that I started with:



Not really much to the circuit and nothing interesting to use in terms of this project, but I thought I'd play about with something easy at first - there's also very little to break here!

After familiarisng myself with the layout and components, I thought I'd try something more interesting/uesful. I got an analog delay pedal from ebay a year or so ago that can be pushed into self-osscilation to make some really crazy sounds, so thought I'd have a look and see what else I could force it to do. The circuit board is much more complex:



This pedal never really worked properly; the delayed signal was always really faint and garbled unless you powered it with an 18v supply - strange for a pedal that is supposed to run from a single 9v battery! Since it wasn't really working properly, I thought I'd dive right in and make some noise. Unfortunately, this approach backfired as the pedal died as soon as I touched a wire to one of the chips:(

So, my first attempts have not been too successful. However, I do have all the tools and parts that I need to get started properly, I just need to get something easier to work on. I have a drum machine, minidisc recorder, iPod nano and an old mobile phone that I was hoping to use for this project, but don't want to see them go the same way as my delay pedal. I think some practice on some cheap toys might be the best option...

Clive