results of modded metal zone.

i know i hear a couple chuckles in the background, i kind laughed myself. after my buddy gary giving me that small stone i was looking through my book on modifying pedals. brian wampler from indyguitarist wrote it. since i'm going to be doing some work on that small stone i figured i might find another one to work on, that way if i had to order parts i could combine them all in one order.

so long story short while flipping through the book i crossed the MT-2 page, and then remembered i had one sitting in one of my drawers. another friend of mine a few years back gave it to me and said "have, see if you can make it work, i know you work on this kind of stuff." so i pulled it out and plugged it in, no sound when engaged. i opened it up and inspected the board. all the solder joints looked fine, no cold ones to be found, and then i saw it... someone had worked on it previously. so i inspected those, and lo and behold there were a couple that had some solder residue between the traces, basically connecting them unintentionally. so i pulled out a guitar pick and carefully scraped them away. plugged it back in and viola! it worked!

once that was established i got to moddin. i didn't complete all the mods, i was missing 2 caps, but everything else i had on hand.

sooooooo:

i took her to youth group tonight cause i've been looking for a decent fuzz/grind pedal for my bass rig. and this thing really got it, and it didn't really cost me anything. i don't really know how it would sound on bass in stock form, but it sounded AWESOME the way it is now. totally happy with the results. the mod was basically removing a couple of caps, replacing a couple others, and switching one diode to an led, and another diode to a different diode.

it has a nice fuzz tone, and the three band EQ

I had a Metal Zone that I modded with Monte Allums' mod kit. It sounded really good. But it's really not something I used at all on a regular basis. Back then my philosophy was that pedals that didn't make my pedalboard had to go. Now I'm more inclined to hang onto them for kicks every once in a while.

Yeah I've modded pedals by ear. Sometimes you can get great results just trying this and that. I modded an OD3 to go from an bluesy overdrive pedal to something more like an ACDC rhythm sound just by trial and error. Replacing caps with better ones is always a good start and LED diodes make good Marshally distortion. I have the wampler pedal guide download version. He makes some good stuff. I am particularly impressed by his Plexidrive demo.

good point on the eartuning. i'm still pretty new to the whole pedal mod world, but am having a blast with it. the wampler book (the download is the same) is really easy to use. i'm getting better at reading schematics, now the hard part, understanding what everything does in the circuit, you know, it's function.

The active EQ is what's called a "gyrator circuit"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrator

cap values help you pick the frequencies affected.