I built something!
Once again I received a Build Your Own Clone pedal kit for Xmas, this year it was the Classic Compressor. I’ve been playing a lot more guitar these days and I seemed like it would be fun to tighten up my sound a bit, so a compressor pedal seemed like a fun project.
The build itself was pretty simple and straightforward. Soldier all the pieces together. Don’t burn myself. Don’t burn anything important. I’m actually getting pretty decent at soldiering, if I do say so myself! What I wanted to do differently with this build was the visual look of the pedal.
The enclosure that comes with the kit is… utilitarian, to say the least. This time I wanted to not only paint the enclosure, but also design and print my own decals for the pedal. The painting was pretty simple, I just sanded down the enclosure, put down a coat of primer, and then used several coats of spray paint.
To do the design decals I ended up drawing some stuff using my Wacom tablet and then doing a layout in Photoshop and finally printing everything onto waterslide decals. For the design I ended up just drawing a simple coffee mug with the word “compresso” on it because it sort of sounds like espresso. Meh… it kinda works! The waterslide decals were pretty cool, you just print onto them, spray them with a clear sealant, wet them and then slide them onto the surface. Once it dried, I sprayed the whole thing with a few layers of clear sealant so the decal would chip or peal off as I stomped on it.
Last, but not least, I wasn’t quite satisfied with the nobs that came with the kit. I wanted something a bit more retro looking so I bought some oven nob style nobs on Amazon to use. They didn’t quite fit the pots on the pedal so I had to Dremel them out a bit before I could put them on the pedal. It’s always fun to have an excuse to play with a Dremel.
The end result looks pretty cool (and sounds pretty good too!) I actually took apart the first pedal I built, an overdrive, with the intention of painting and adding a decal to it as well. The stuff I learned doing this pedal will be very helpful.
Here she is:
