Learn to design and build your own guitar pedals, the easy and fun way
If you're a musician who's always wanted to use their creativity to sculpt their own guitar tone, I can teach you to design and build your own custom guitar pedals... no math, no complicated engineering jargon, just pure tonal fun!
Where are you right now?
Pick the one that sounds like you and I will point you at the perfect place to start.
I have never built anything
You've wanted to try this for years. Or maybe you've just wondered if it was something you could actually learn. Or maybe you're a musician who loves trying new gear, and you've wondered how far that curiosity could take you.
Start at step oneI build kits, but I'm still not sure how the circuitry works
You've built a couple of guitar pedal kits, but you don't quite understand how to change different parts in the circuit to get the sounds you hear in your head. Or maybe you followed some cookie-cutter recipes on changing things, but you want to make it your own and you're not sure how to do that. Or maybe you know a couple of simple circuit designs, but you want to get into more extravagant circuits so you can make something truly inspiring.
Start at step twoI prefer delays, reverbs, modulations, and other digital-based effects
You prefer time-based effects, tone-changing textures, and sounds that aren't easily achieved in the analog world. And maybe you'd love to create your own plugins for your DAW too.
Start at step threeFour steps to the circuit block system
If you're starting from zero, start at step one. You may already have some of this under your belt though, so you might want to jump in somewhere else. The steps below show you where.
Start here if you know nothing about schematics, soldering, or parts
This is where most people start. You've got a deep curiosity about all of it, but you have no idea how to begin, and you don't want to waste a bunch of time digging through forums and YouTube videos trying to piece it together yourself.
- Assumes you're starting from zero. No experience needed whatsoever, and no math knowledge either, because we use special circuit calculators
- Schematics broken down by which parts change your tone, and how to get different tones by changing parts or adding circuits
- We'll build easy boosts, overdrives, distortions, and fuzzes from the ground up, using something called a breadboard
- I'll teach you to read any schematic and understand exactly what you're looking at
- Includes a private forum where you can ask me and my staff questions if you get stuck
Once you've got the basics, move up to bigger and more complicated circuits
This one is for you if you've built a DIY pedal kit, or even a couple of them. Maybe you've built a Tube Screamer, or a Fuzz Face, or even a Big Muff. Maybe you've swapped some diodes and capacitors based on what you picked up from forums and YouTube videos. If step one is the beginner course, this is the intermediate version.
- A whole variety of different types of circuits
- A deep dive on clipping and gain staging
- Extravagant EQ designs, all explained in an easy to understand way
- Still no math, using the same special circuit calculators
- Ends with how to take your design and put it in an enclosure, ready for your pedal board
Build digital guitar effects, and your own plugins to run them in your DAW
Analog delay circuits are very limiting. Building them in the digital world opens up a lot more possibilities without changing your tone. Creating an accurate, ethereal reverb used to mean huge steel plates or extravagant spring tanks. And if you ever wanted to build your own looper with its own built-in effects chain, that was nearly impossible. Done digitally, you're only limited by your creativity, and the accuracy is nearly unparalleled.
- Learning to code in a complicated language used to take a huge amount of time and a knowledge set that took years to really understand. This course solves that problem
- Delays, reverbs, modulations, pitch shifting, and loopers, built the way you want them
- The same effect converts easily into a plugin you use inside your DAW
- Only limited by your creativity, with accuracy that is nearly unparalleled
Go further with LTSpice and PCB design for guitar pedals
Once you can design a circuit, there are two things builders want next. One is seeing what a change does before you physically touch a part, and the other is turning a working design into a real printed circuit board you can hold. I brought in two guys who do those things better than I do, and they teach these two courses.
The Complete LTSpice Course for Pedal Builders
You can test a guitar pedal circuit on your computer before you build any of it, and most builders never realize that is even possible. If you have already tried LTSpice, you probably found out it was written for engineers and gave up on it. Sascha Suhr teaches it the easy way in this one. You change a part, you see right away what it did to the circuit, and you do all of it without fighting the program.
How to Design PCBs for DIY Guitar Pedals
This one is for you if you already understand circuits and schematics and you have designed a few things of your own, and now you want to get a design onto a real circuit board. Laying out a board looks like a complicated job from the outside. Jake Steffes takes it apart and walks you through the whole thing with complete guidance, so you end up with a board you can send off and feel good about.
Both of these come with the same 30 day money-back guarantee as everything else on this page, and the same private forum where you can get help from me or one of my staff when you get stuck.
Open the calculators
Buy the beginner and intermediate course for one low price
The beginner and intermediate courses are two of our most popular courses, and many folks end up buying both. This is why we created a bundle where you can get them both at one time for a special low price.
What students say after they build something
Here are a couple of reviews from our courses.
★★★★★I cannot explain how much this course did for me
I'm 72 years old, slept through electronics in high school and later kind of felt like I was missing out on something. Schematics were Sanskrit to me. I started building kits and realized the schematics were useless to me if I had a problem. I saw a Facebook ad for Brian's course and figured I'd give it a shot. What I have learned from his engaging and highly informative course cannot be overstated. I now design and build my own pedals from what Brian has taught me. I would pay for the pedals I've built. Highly recommended. More please!
Kenneth Sailors Beginner guitar pedal design course
★★★★★Go beyond the kits
My goal in taking Brian's course was to go beyond assembling kits. I wanted to be able to understand what the pieces were doing together, whether I was looking at the schematic or the circuit board, and change things if I wanted to. I can say this course went above and beyond that for me and I have already begun designing some circuits myself, and have modded a few friends' pedals. If you are at all interested in what's going on under the hood of your pedals, want to dive into the building blocks of audio circuitry, or build and mod your own pedals, I highly recommend this course.
Vince Fedor Beginner guitar pedal design course
Take 25% off your first course
Put in your name and email and the discount comes straight to your inbox, good on any course on this page. You also get my custom online guitar pedal circuit calculators, and my notes on pedal building and circuit design as I send them out.
No charge, and you can unsubscribe any time you want.
Anyone can learn to build pedals
Years ago, before Wampler Pedals existed, I was a weekend guitar player who could not tell you the difference between a resistor and a capacitor. I just wanted a sound that nothing on the market could quite nail, so I started digging into circuits and feeling like an idiot half the time.
Then one night, staring at a desk covered in schematics, I noticed the same little sections showing up over and over in different pedals. Like building blocks, each one doing a specific job. After that, schematics were not hieroglyphics anymore, and I could design any sound I wanted.
That circuit blocks approach became the foundation of everything we built at Wampler Pedals, and it is what every course here teaches. No gatekeeping, no unnecessary math, and nobody making you feel stupid for asking a question.
Questions people ask before they start
If yours isn't here, send me a message and ask me directly.
No. Step one assumes you're starting from zero and know nothing about schematics, soldering, or parts. Every component is explained by what it does to your tone, and you build on a breadboard so nothing is permanent while you're learning.
No math knowledge is needed. We use special circuit calculators instead of working through formulas by hand, in both the beginner and the intermediate course. You spend your time listening to what a change does, not deriving it on paper.
If you've never built anything, start at step one. If you've already built a kit or two and want to understand how to change a circuit on purpose, start at step two. If what you really want is delays, reverbs, modulations, and your own plugins, go straight to step three.
Yes. Learning a coding language used to take years before you could build anything worth hearing, and step three solves that problem. You describe the effect you want, listen to it, and change what you don't like, the same way you'd work on an analog circuit.
Sometimes, but that's the wrong reason to do it. Parts for one pedal are cheap, though the tools and the time add up. What you're really buying is control, because you can build the sound you hear in your head instead of buying the closest thing somebody else made.
Not to get going. Step one is built on a breadboard, which means you're pushing parts into holes and pulling them back out while you listen, with no soldering iron involved. Soldering comes later, when you're ready to put a finished design into an enclosure.
There's a private forum where you can ask me and my staff directly. That's the whole point of it. Nobody gets talked down to for asking a question, no matter how basic it seems.
Reach out within 30 days and you get a refund or a credit, whichever you'd rather have. No hoops, and no talking you out of it.
Start designing your own guitar pedals at step one
Step one assumes you know nothing going in. You build on a breadboard so nothing is permanent, you hear what every change does while you make it, and I am in the forum with my staff when you get stuck.
Start at step one