Yesterday I posted about ripping the guts out of my favorite fuzz pedal, the Electro-harmonix Big Muff Pi. Today I show you how to do it.
The pedal has a really classic harmonic distortion sound- everything from woolly muffling to bee-hive droning. I must use the thing more than any other pedal on my board. But its sound might not be the only reason behind that; the thing takes up the space of two standard-sized pedals, dominating the real estate and sticking out like a big bully.
As I add more pedals to my board, the size of the Big Muff just gets more and more obnoxious. This is compounded by the fact that its electronics only take up about 40% of the housing! Look at the picture to the left- you can see all the free space that’s left after that tiny circuit board is installed. Electro-harmonix has themselves started housing their pedals in smaller, more manageable-sized enclosures, but I bought mine long before they ditched the nostalgia of these bread boxes.
So what was I to do? Well, rehouse it myself, of course. I wanted to share how easy it was (it only took me an hour or so, including drilling the new enclosure), in case you felt the urge to shrink down your own pedals. The techniques I use can be applied to a good bunch of the pedals out there, especially the ones in enclosures as easy to open as EHX’s.
The first thing I did was bring the guts of the pedal with me to Fry’s Electronics to find the right sized enclosure…
