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How to Modify Guitar Pedals

This package will teach you exactly how to modify and custom tailor each of your effects pedals to your needs and tastes. No experience needed! Includes: * Complete details on how to modify OVER 80 DIFFERENT EFFECT PEDALS! * Basic Definitions and Concepts of effect pedals, their circuitry, and mods * "Walkthroughs" of various circuits - what all those parts do, and...

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A very useful, but not the most consistent guide to modifying pedals

Comments

Brian Wampler is well known amongst effects pedal modifiers as a great source for pedal mods. This book is a culmination of his effect pedal modification knowledge, available in one place for budding pedal hackers.

I wanted to embark on modifying pedals for myself, and I bought this book on recommendation by a pedal building friend.

This book provides a list of modifications for over 80 specific pedals, and a lot of basic information, such as soldering and de-soldering, repairing broken PCB tracks, adding potentiometers in place of resistors, and more.

Now one might say that all of this information is freely available on the Internet, but the issue is finding it. Now again, it's not too hard to find the information, but having to look at a computer all the time, or print out loose pages with parts lists and diagrams can be a bit annoying. I bough the book so I could just have it next to me while working on things, and also so I could flick through it where ever I felt reading it.

Now Wampler has done a great job of collecting all of this information and compiling it into book form, but I do have some issues with regards to the quality of the text.

There is a plethora of information packed in to the book, but my main problem with it is the consistency of how it is laid out. It is obvious that Wampler has collected the information over the years, without worrying about some sort of single template for compiling the information.

Some of the pedal mods are nicely laid out, where there are tables of parts to replace, and explanations of what tonal changes should occur from the changes. Other pedals just have lists of parts to change, with no explanation whatsoever. The look of how the information is laid out is inconsistent too, which is a little unprofessional for a publication. Schematics of pedals are also very inconsistent, with some being nicely drawn up on computer, and others drawn by hand, which are at times very hard to read.

The book is also printed in black and white, which makes viewing images of pedal PCBs very hard to make out at times. I would have liked to see colour printing to have been done so everything could be legible.

So in one hand "How to modify guitar pedals" is a great all-in-one resource for beginners to start modifying pedals, but on the other hand it is a little annoying to read through when the look of the book changes constantly.

I wish Wampler had spent more time trying to make the book more consistent, and neatly laid out. I understand that the information has been collected over the years from a variety of sources, but consistency is so important with publications of any kind.

I can understand the reasoning behind black and white printing though. Colour printing can cost a considerable amount more, especially with independent spot publishing such as this book. It would be nice to offer up a way of getting an electronic version of the book though with colour so people can see the pictures clearly in some way.

Overall I think "How to modify guitar pedals" is an extremely valuable all-in-one resource for the budding amateur pedal hacker. It's just a pity that a bit more time wasn't taken by the author to put together the book in a neat consistent manner.

Liked about it	Great all-in-one resource for modifying many different effects pedals in an easy to understand way. * Great general information on components and techniques.
Didn't like	Inconsistent in layout and information. * Black and white printing makes it a bit hard to make out PCB images