Award Sounds

December was good; I received two FX pedal kits. They were the Build-Your-Own-Clone Tremolo and Build-Your-Own-Clone Overdrive.

I've already built a BYOC Triboost and was so impressed with it that they're now the first supplier I look to for pedals. I chose the BYOC Tremolo because I've yet to find a tremolo pedal I'm happy with. That might sound odd at first, but I wanted one that I could modify easily to fit my needs.

The Build

I should mention that the BYOC pedals are kits that you have to build yourself. The tremolo was the easiest pedal to build out of the three by a long way. I'm hoping that it's also the easiest to modify.

It didn't work straight away, so I played with it. I plugged in a battery, guitar and amp and then fiddled with each component in turn, hoping to find one with a loose solder joint. Fortunately wiggling one of the transistors brought the sound back. It was a quick job to resolder the joints on that component and now the pedals works really well.

The Sound

The stock pedal features depth and rate control. The sound quality has been great. I say "has been" because I was playing with the internal trim-pot and turned it up too much. So now it's slightly distorted, but not in a bad way. I'm not sure if it's the tremolo boosting the input to the amplifier or if there's something internal to the pedal that's distorting. It's easy enough to sort out, I'll unscrew the base and turn the trim-pot back down. I could probably have done that in the time I wrote this paragraph :-)

It's very musical. Some tremolo pedals are too harsh. I like what this one does. It's clean as well. I'll get some audio clips later in the week - that'll beat trying to explain how it sounds in words.. Audio clips now in a following article.

Why Tremolo?

I've used the tremolo effect in a creative way for recording and mixing, but never in a live situation. I've never felt it to be that important, always preferring to start modifying the signal with a chorus pedal. However, the BYOC Tremolo gives a good starting point for a live tremolo.

Why Modify?

This particular pedal has a lot of potential, but there are a few items I'd like to change:

• The tremolo rate is too fast for my liking. I'd prefer a slower rate, slower than the rate pot currently allows for.
• I like the idea of the soft/hard mod
• There's a documented mod for increasing the depth - think it's a simple component change
• I've seen some mention of adding another couple of pots for a second set of controls, but I can imagine that being hard work in the size box that comes as stock.

Images

Click on image to display larger image of the Build-Your-Own-Clone Tremolo pedal. It's unfinished and I haven't put the plastic knobs on top. I'll post an image of the painted casing, but I won't have finished for a month or so; it's low on my priorities. 

Audio Files

I've put the clips in an article for the audio files