Most stompbox authorities would probably scoff at the idea of a Silicon transistor version of the Fuzz Face with the “common” 2N3904″ transistors.  However this is exactly what it is and it is my (JD’s) favorite version of the kit that we sell.  Smooth and a lot of sustain, very nice.   Check out the youTube Demo video by clicking the image above.  

The details of the Speaker Patch Box can be found on the Speaker Switch Page.

This is a Demo of the General Guitar Gadgets “J1″ Booster (StratoBlaster Replica with an input cap).  We demo’ed a bit of the boosted sound and then what you can do with the “J1″ into a distortion stompbox and then the “J1″ straight into a tube amp.  The volume level of the amps during this demo is fairly low, certainly not nearly as loud as it would normally take to get this kind of sustain.

Any trademarks mentioned here belong to their rightful owners and not General Guitar Gadgets

JD Sleep
General Guitar gadgets

Below is a before and after of  the cabs, after I cleaned up and “re-clothed” one of them.  I used “magic erasers” (little white cleaning sponges) to get the logo and piping clean and white.  If you’ve never used Magic Erasers before, get some!  They work really well for getting stains off hard surfaces around the house (and white Marshall logos as well).  I used Oz Cream Polish to clean the tolex.  I also highly recommend “Oz”  If you have a tolex covered amp, guitar case or whatever.  It’ll make your amp look brand new.  I didn’t quite get the cloth on perfectly straight, but its pure black cloth and only a small area to cover so you don’t notice it, unless you are looking at it closely.

Now I have a nice little “stack” for my old Epiphone Valve Jr. amp.  This stack sounds great!  There is no “clean” sound from this rig, the Valve Jr., doesn’t “Clean Up” unless it’s on barely audible volume level.  I previously had the Valve Jr. paired up with a single 12″ speaker cab, but this stack really cranks out an awesome full sound!

There is a problem that I had to address to get this stack working.  The Epiphone amp has one speaker output jack (per ohm value) and each of the cabs also has one jack.  So how do I hook up both cabs?  I found the jack-cone-part for the back panel is available to buy and I thought about putting an extra jack on the back of one of the cabs to “chain” them together.  I decided to keep the cabs stock.  

In my next blog I’ll show how I addressed this problem using a little DIY speaker patch box. and I’ll demo the sound of this stack.

JD Sleep
General Guitar Gadgets

Some of you who have been involved in do-it-yourself guitar effects for more than a decade will probably remember the days when all 125B enclosures had grooves all around the inside of the enclosures.  This was probably 10 to 15 years ago.  The word was that the grooves were there so that you could slide PCB cards into the appropriate grooves for your needs and it would hold your circuits in place.  I don’t really know for sure if that is what they were there for, but it seemed like a reasonable explanation.  

Well, in my mind (full of great ideas) I thought: why don’t I design my PCBs to fit in the grooves and use the groove as intended.  The PCB fits vertically so there was a lot more room in the box for more pots, switches and jacks without having the circuit get in the way.   It really wasn’t a bad idea (except for one huge thing that I bet you can all guess).  So, I designed about eight or nine PCBs that fit in the grooves, including circuits based on Big Muff, Tube Screamer, Green Ringer, Orange Squeezer, Fuzz Face, Octavia and a few others (trade marks mentioned here belong to their rightful owners not General Guitar Gadgets).  Some of the fortunate folks who bought GGG Pedals 10 to 12 years ago may have one with the PCB in the grooves!  (Bobble based on BMP photo below)

As most of you have probably guessed by now, about the time I got into full production with these made-to-fit PCBs, someone (who I won’t mention by name) talked one of the enclosure manufacturers into supplying them with a non-grooved version of the 125B.  The non-grooved 125B’s where a hit!  Within a matter of (literally) months, the non-grooved versions were everywhere and the old grooved versions were virtually impossible to find.  There went my great idea…

My lesson learned was: never design a PCB based on a certain enclosure.  This lesson carried over further so that we don’t design PCBs based on any given enclosure drill pattern either.  This is part of our continuing philosophy on the style of kits we offer and it allows us to offer kits with various enclosure options and even options to buy the kit without the enclosure and use your own enclosure with simpler design considerations.

I think most people (including me) would agree that the 125B is much better off without the grooves.  The grooves did make drilling and placement of jacks (or other side-mounted components) sort of weird to say the least.  But it’s a funny story of bad timing on our part and some DIY stompbox history!

Written by:
JD Sleep
General Guitar Gadgets

The GGG SWALOKAS!

I have a hard time keeping up with all the modern “lingo”.  Seems like a new word or acronym is “in vogue” every day.  BOGO is a new “word” I discovered lately.  Who knows maybe it’s been around for years, sometimes I’m so uncool and miss out.  Apparently it means buy-one-get-one…free”.  But shouldn’t it be BOGOF?   I mean if you buy one wouldn’t you expect to get one?  Maybe it should be BOGNOF – buy-one-get-nuther-one-free.  Or maybe BOGOFFCOL  buy-one-get-one-free-for-cryin’-out-loud.   I hate the fact that people don’t check with me first before they come up with the latest buzz-words!

So there’s something new in the stompbox world called workstations.  Shouldn’t they be called playstations?  Or has that already been taken? But don’t we play the guitar, not work the guitar.  Or maybe we do work the guitar.  If it’s electric, it’s getting to be hard work to make the guitar/effect/amp sounds into music.  

Maybe it shouldn’t be workstations or playstations maybe they should be called “LoveStations”  because you’re just gonna love it… or, maybe, “TrainStations” because it’s so complicated you have to be trained to use it…or maybe “WhetherStations”, because you don’t know “whether” to buy the stompbox for the gig or a used car to get to your part-time job.  

I believe I will call them  SWALOKAS=”Stompbox With A Lot Of Knobs And Switches!”  What do you think? 

Many regular browser of our site might not realize all of the many the Tone Bender variations we have on the site.   We have a plethora of Tone Bender variations, some of which are shown in the photo above.  They vary greatly in sound and tone, but they all have charming and classic sounds!  We have versions for silicon transisters that also sound great.   To make things easy see the links below.

• ToneBender Mark II
• ToneBender 3
• Supa ToneBender
• Jumbo ToneBender
• Yard Box (Prescription)
• Soul Bender
• Bass Fuzz (similar to Jumbo)

We don’t have a lot of information yet on the minor part variations and differences in the many spin-off such as Vox, Park, Sola or Color Sound, but the information is available on the net and the variations can all be built with our PCBs or kits.   We hope you enjoy these great fuzz tones!

Phase Shifter

General Guitar Gadgets started as a small website in the year 2000. We went under the name “Guitar Effects Projects” when we started. After some careful thought we felt that the name was a bit generic so we changed it a few years later to General Guitar Gadgets. When we started our our first web site, believe it or not, we were the only site on the internet featuring guitar effect PCB layouts. I was spending a lot of time doing PCB layouts (for myself) for the schematics that were on the internet, so I thought it would be a good idea to share my layouts on a website. My layout skills were pretty bad at the time and you can still find some of the atrocious layouts that I did during those early years.

Our first website was on a free hosting company server. Soon, the site was getting too much traffic and we had to find other hosts. The good people at Ampage offered to host us on their server, but our traffic got to be too much for them as well. We decided to get a real host server and do a major upgrade to the site around 2005.

In 2003 we started selling PCB that we etched and drilled ourselves, and we sold lots of PCBs for the next 3 years. In 2006 we made it a full-time business and started selling kits as well as PCB and started out-sourcing our PCB production with high-quality double-sided through-hole-plated PCBs.

That’s a brief summary of our history, now here’s a summary of our philosophy.

We like free stuff.

We also like it when you buy stuff from us, but…all the projects on the site are free for you to use to build your own guitar effects, including PCB layouts. This goes far beyond just posting instructions for our kits. All of our PCBs are designed factoring in the idea that they could be etched at home using the PCB mask provided. It may not sound like much, but the possibilities of an industrial double-sided PCB with razor thin traces far exceeds a single-sided PCB that can be etched at home. So the PCBs are designed accordingly. Most of our PCBs aren’t as small and/or as snazzy as they could be, but now you know why.

We like flexibility.

Sometimes our designs don’t seem to make sense to novice builders. For instance: Why are there extra spaces on the PCB that aren’t used? Why don’t we use PCB mount potentiometers and switches, to reduce the amount of hookup wiring? Why aren’t the boxes drilled differently? The answer to these questions and many more is: to provide maximum flexibility to the builder. You

already have an enclosure you want to use? All of our kits have the option of buying the kit without the enclosure (at a lower cost of course). Or different size enclosures. We also have lots of multi-use PCBs and room for modifications on many of our PCBs.

We like awesome sound more than vintage part numbers and values.

All of our kits are tuned by ear and they sound great! We have gone against the grain in some cases, when we use some parts or design variations other than the original. We do this when it is clear that the updates are unquestionably better than the original. We always use true bypass, even when the originals weren’t. Any stompbox can be easily buffered (like boss and Ibanez pedals) if you are so inclined. In some cases, we supply parts that are easier to acquire than the original part numbers. Some original parts are no longer available or are just hard to find and/or expensive. It’s a sad, brutal reality we all face from time to time. In all cases our substitutions (overall) sound as good or better than the originals. In the case of our germanium fuzz tones and boosters, we don’t include the germanium transistors because if you think you need it, you can probably source a better set of transistors than I can. But all of our kits that originally had a germanium transistor come with a good quality transistor socket and good set of silicon transistors and instructions on how to build a great sounding fuzz tone or booster using silicon transistor(s).

We like great quality.

I’ve never built a guitar effect kit from any other kit seller, but I have built kits from Velleman and other common suppliers and to be completely frank, the quality of those kits is junk compared to our kits. You may find kits on the net for much less cost than ours, but you will get what you pay for. We’re probably not the only source of good quality guitar effects kits on the internet, but our kits have the very best possible quality within the limits of our price range.

GGG Stacks

In an effort to let you know more about our business practices, this blog is about our business philosophy.

• We strive to provide the high level of quality products and service that we ourselves would wish to receive when we buy online from other companies. We want to provide the absolute best quality kits and PCBs on the internet, and we believe we do.
• We charge fair prices, commensurate with our costs.
• We don’t hide higher prices in the form of “Shipping & Handling fees”. We use shipping tables for our pricing and set it to be as close to our actual cost as possible.
• We don’t play psycho-games with you by pricing down by a penny. For example, one of our kits might be priced at $60.00 not $59.99. Pricing at $59.99 is either a form of psychological trickery or an insult to your intelligence. Either way we find it detestable.
• We are a family business. Our facility is on the same property as our home. All of our labor is done by family members (mostly JD). Important matters are discussed in a family forum. Decisions are sometimes made by what’s best for the family, not what’s best for the business. That’s not to say we compromise our business, just that family is always more important than business.
• We believe there is right and wrong. We believe there are absolute truths and we believe in truth and not deception and lies. We believe in complete honesty in all business dealings with customers and dealers we buy from.
• We believe in working six days a week and having one day a week (Saturday) off for a day of complete rest. This is an important part of good physical, mental, and spiritual health. There are also a few times during the year when we take atypical holidays (not government sanctioned).
• We are not perfect (by any means). We hope you will let us know if you are in anyway unsatisfied with anything we sell or anything listed on the site or if you are unsatisfied by the way you were treated as a customer, dealer or inquirer. We have been working hard on being more diligent to correct errors on the site in a more timely manner. You can help by letting us know about any mistakes you find.

We appreciate your comments.

JD Sleep
General Guitar Gadgets