Building custom pedals — Double Boost

I’ve been putting together some pedals with custom graphics for folks before Exmas.

This one’s for Don Kohinga in Melbourne, Australia. His company is Southern Cross amplification, so I chose a stellar theme and imposed the southern cross over it.

The pedal is a two stage clean boost based on the Performance Enhancer. The problem was that Don wanted to run his performance enhancer all the time, but he still wanted to have two volume levels — a boost for leads and a lower volume for rhythm sections. The performance enhancer can add something really nice to an acoustic guitar tone, so this is a common conundrum.

This configuration allows the user to run the pedal all the time, dialing in the higher level of boost with the Volume control, and a lower level of boost with the gain control. A kick of the High/Low switch turns the gain control on and off — switching between the higher and lower volumes.

Click on the images for a closeup of the artwork. The graphics are applied over a hand-painted box, so bad masking and rattlecan errors are obvious, but I’m pretty happy with how this one came out.