Switches & channels

Switches, either mechanical or digital, provide opportunities to route different part of the circuits around in some interesting ways.

To start, I have always been a fan of having two channels on pedals, something attracts me to that sort of design. Probably my early exposure in pedals to the DBA soundsaw and kill kill filter.

Recently, there is a Big Muff by Wren and Cuff ("Garbage Face")  that has been released which allows for two different volume settings for a channel.

I can't say for certain how they implement this, but if I had to guess it would be like the old Beavis audio, two pots on a stomp with an LED approach. http://beavisaudio.com/techpages/switches/

Not a bad approach at all! Easy to implement, minimum parts count and greatly expands the sonic pallete of a certain pedal.  In fact the DBA KKF uses this type of control, to change the tone potentiometer. Move this over to the potentiometer for gain, and you can have two channels which allow you to vary the saturation of your dirt circuit. All of this with a 3PDT switch (Stomp or toggle pick your poison)

If you don't care for the LED indicator, you could get by with the DPDT. But wait!!! What about other options.  As far as mechanical switches go, we can move up the the 4PDT. Which depending on how we want to implement it for channel switching, we could get creative and allow changes to be made to 3 controls of a circuit, but would need to isolate components so they don't interact across channels. I.e. the we don't want the volume control for channel one to change the volume of channel two. Digital switching systems are more complicated, but offer a longer life-span and the potential for more parameters of the pedal to be channel switched.  This comes at the cost of more knobs to interact with though. Digital presets are the next evolution which allow you to have the base number of potentiomers and the ability to cycle through "saved" states.  The challenge with this approach is not being able to see what the preset was.

The NEW DBA ROOMS pedal looks to have 3 channels switchable on their "ALT" footswitch. While there are large knobs for Frequency, Depth, and Time, there is also a smaller 9mm potentiometers for F, D, and T which I am going to guess is tied to the ALT footswitch.

This of course depends on how the potentiometer is oriented in the circuit to begin with. This is most ideal for potentiometers set up as voltage dividers.


This is brief post covering aspects of mechanical switches for "multi channel" modifications to your pedal, but also serve as a backdrop to part of the process going into the Sound Saw REMAKE. The pedal toggles back and forth between the boost and the filter sides of the circuit.

Thoughts on the SoundSaw

Hey team,
 Glad you could join me, now let us begin.

SOUND SAW
what was the deal with that pedal anyway? Crazy awesome sounding demos on the old DBA website, but they are hard to come by and there is one schematic that has been floating around for years now.

Back in 2014-2016ish, I was helping Glass Hero screen some enclosures with the Sound Saw artwork until he disappeared (hope all is well). It was about that time that my life got complicated and I had to put a lot of things on hold and move states to a new job, now after moving to another state for another job, I feel like building pedals again. I have been ever so slowly unpacking my tools and reviewing old schematics I had drawn up to try and start being a little more efficient with my design process.

Part of this process is putting out a SOUND SAW REMAKE. I am looking at the instruction card from the original and tasking myself to recreate a pedal like this. Something that has the same functionality, but with improvements based on my knowledge thus far and what I would want, and something that adds to the original

After looking through the forums and customer reviews and feedback, I hope to incorporate those ideas and create an excellent REMAKE.  At the end of the day, I will probably email Oliver the results of my passion project and send him my REMAKE.

I have sent off for PCBs to test the backbone circuit of the pedal.

From here I will be developing the upgraded (deluxe) variant of the pedal.

I would really like to dig into some programming to make this process incorporate a challenge of a different dimension. Another reason is the relatively short foot switch lifespan of mechanical bypass pedals. With a pedal which you can toggle channels for huge variations in sound, a foot switch will most likely get plenty of use.  Once it is all used up, what is the customer left with? a dead foot switch. Let's try and avoid that from here on out.

I'll keep you all posted as I move forward with this project.

After this I can get around to....reverb pedal REMAKE.

Best regards