Build Your Own Golden Gizmo™ Zero Volt Pickup Booster | DIY Scratch Build Effects Pedal

No Power Required! Build Your Own Golden Gizmo™️ Pickup Booster, one of the Best DIY Scratch Build Projects ever!
Works great for Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar and even Bass

- Golden Gizmo™ V2 Pedal

- Golden Gizmo™ V2 Schematic

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Waylon McPherson Guitar

My Originals Project Whiskey Soho

My Day Job "McPherson Stompboxes NZ"

[allenmitchell]

This would be cool to do under the pickguard.

[simonhawker]

i prefer the sound of a compression sustainer but very useful thing you got there, in a studio, cool

[mattfleming]

Fascinating. So your trading low end, which requires a lot more power, for volume in the upper mods.
This may actually solve an issue I’ve had forever. 2 guitar band, I provide the low end, the other guitar is giving definition for the riffs with strong mids. I do the solos which obviously doesn’t work well with a low frequencies.This may be just the thing!

[davidp]

Thanks for this video. Your solder joints look perfect, and details about cleaning the screw holes for reliable grounding and details that most folks (like me) would overlook. Good stuff.

[anthonyb]

I just got a desktop class A tube amp and some reference monitors for my computer. It was super cool to hear the nuance of the different tones you got from that gear.

[Haiasiriku]

I could imagine you could throw some diodes in there. Mental😮

[oddshot]

LOVE your projects. After 73 years of studiously avoiding electronics, you are turning me into a boffin ... or at least a nerd of sorts. Any chance you could do up a nice lush, yet simple Hawaiian sounding spring reverb for lap steel guitars?

[simonkormendy]

Essentially, the circuit uses a small-signal transformer to step-up the voltage signal from the guitar's pickups, the signal voltage gets stepped up by the turns-ratio of the transformer, so, say the transformer's turns-ratio is something like 4:1, i.e. 4 secondary turns to every 1 primary turn, so theoretically if we feed-in a 1Vpp signal into the primary we should see a 4Vpp signal on the secondary winding, but transformers are, in general, about 80% efficient, 20% of the signal is lost in the form of heat, we still get an increase in signal-level though.

[bluzmansix]

Awesome my friend. I love your thinking behind these. Right let's warm up the soldering iron!

[Joseph-yp]

Hey man, this channel is awesome!! Really love these pedal videos!

Subbed!

[ditchgator]

The passive transformer in my Yamaha Revstar RSS02T is huge in comparison.
Very useful tonally with volume control along with a boost.😎👍👍

[tengoodbud]

Awesome love passive electronic projects.

[gabrielvargas]

Your work is wonderful man! Your explanation of how does it work and the outcome makes it really easy to understand
I've had studied electronics before to the point of achieving an associate's degree, but was always scared of some kind of messing with guitar pedals, (tried building an overdrive once but the capacitors didn't quite like the project) your channel has inspired to retry messing with pedals again, thanks a million for your videos man, keep going!

[commonsensehill]

If you wanted to, you could mount this inside a cavity on your guitar and have the knob and perhaps a toggle switch coming through the front. It could work that way if done right.

[GHunter]

You’re awesome man. Been watching your videos all week

[JamesFord-ge]

Cool idea using a transformer for as the pickups providers voltage to drive the transformer that gives more voltage output in the signal chain

[ValBoschi-ixcd]

So different to anything I've come across.... very cool... merci.

[Rob-wgnz]

You can make a pretty decent JFet buffer with 7-8 components, then you either put it in the pedal (then it's not passive anymore) or make separate a buffer pedal to use if you are running a passive guitar. A Jfet buffer also leaves the frequency response almost intact.

A passive guitar cannot drive this pedal because the secondary of the transformer is effectively a small resistance that goes to ground, so since the power generated by the pickup is constant and equal to V_out/R_out^2, if you put a low output resistance since the power has to remain constant (because there is no buffer) the output voltage goes down. So pickups and piezos work well with high output impedances.

[TorySlusher]

As someone who mostly uses the neck pickup for jazz applications, and single coils in that regard as it would be useful to solder this little circuit between the neck pickup wire and the switch (assuming that's where it would go)....

[JulioBergo]

It's a reamp box with buffer. Nice!