Friday Update #1

Project and Motivation

For my final project, I’m going to be building a reprogrammable guitar effects pedal. I will be closely following a Sparkfun tutorial to build the hardware. The pedal will use a teensy to control the effects, so that is where the project will get creative. There are a number of pre-made effects already online, but I want to build my own custom phaser or flanger. This will be the more time-intensive part of the process, but perhaps the more fulfilling.

This project’s motivation comes from a love of guitar and guitar effects. My own pedal board already has a number of effects (chorus, overdrive, delay), but to complete my sound, I want to add some new effects. Because the pedal is reprogrammable, if I want a different effect for a different recording, I can take the time to make the new effect (albeit not on stage, that would be kind of time-consuming). I really enjoyed playing with Max for our last lab, so I’m excited to mess around with the effects and sounds that it can produce.

Background Research

Building a guitar pedal is pretty difficult to do from scratch. It involves complex circuitry and design, and a in-depth knowledge of sound and effects. Luckily, there is a tutorial online for building the pedal I want to build: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/proto-pedal-example-programmable-digital-pedal. Like I said, I will follow this tutorial to build the hardware.

Along with the tutorial are a number of pre-made effects: https://github.com/sparkfun/Proto_Pedal/tree/master/projects/teensy-based/sketches. Using these as a starting point, I will build and change them as best I can to create the effects I want.