Distortion Pedal Build & Engineering
Budget: $250 – $750 USD
I’m working with Gibson Guitars developing a boutique distortion/overdrive pedal and now need a seasoned pedal builder who can take my draft schematic all the way to a noise-free, road-ready unit. Your core task is the hands-on build: sourcing the right through-hole or SMD parts, laying out and ordering the PCB, populating it, boxing it up with true-bypass switching, and verifying that the finished pedal delivers consistent gain structure, harmonic richness, and minimal hiss under real-world playing conditions.
Solid grounding in PCB design and wider sound-engineering principles is still essential, as you’ll be making component-level tweaks to voice the circuit and meet final sonic targets. If you’re comfortable iterating layouts in KiCad, Eagle, or Altium, debugging with an oscilloscope and audio analyzer, and biasing JFET/MOSFET stages for sweet-spot clipping, you’ll fit right in.
To keep this moving, please send links or files that showcase past work—finished pedals, gut-shots of your boards, audio demos, or any published PCB designs. That gives me a clear idea of your build quality and tonal results.
Expected deliverables:
• Finalized schematic and annotated PCB layout files (Gerbers & drill)
• Complete, vendor-specific BOM
• One fully assembled, tested prototype ready for shipping to me
• Brief test report with audio samples confirming gain range and noise floor
I’m ready to start as soon as I find the right builder and can ship out any specialty enclosures or graphics you might need. Looking forward to hearing your tone-shaping successes!
Solid grounding in PCB design and wider sound-engineering principles is still essential, as you’ll be making component-level tweaks to voice the circuit and meet final sonic targets. If you’re comfortable iterating layouts in KiCad, Eagle, or Altium, debugging with an oscilloscope and audio analyzer, and biasing JFET/MOSFET stages for sweet-spot clipping, you’ll fit right in.
To keep this moving, please send links or files that showcase past work—finished pedals, gut-shots of your boards, audio demos, or any published PCB designs. That gives me a clear idea of your build quality and tonal results.
Expected deliverables:
• Finalized schematic and annotated PCB layout files (Gerbers & drill)
• Complete, vendor-specific BOM
• One fully assembled, tested prototype ready for shipping to me
• Brief test report with audio samples confirming gain range and noise floor
I’m ready to start as soon as I find the right builder and can ship out any specialty enclosures or graphics you might need. Looking forward to hearing your tone-shaping successes!