Sunday, January 6, 2013

Walkman Distortion Box

Here's a look at my latest electronics project, a distortion effect box for electric guitar made out of a cassette walkman.  This is perfect for me not only because I've been stockpiling walkmans for years now, since they were so cool when I was a kid, and now they're available for $1 at any junk store, but also because this project is right at my skill level, it really was much easier to do this than you'd think.  You could use any small cassette player for this, but I think the cheaper it is, the better the distortion will end up sounding.  I used a GPX model that doesn't even have a radio, so there really wasn't much to it, I pretty much just took the little circuit board out and did a little re-wiring.  Finally, I housed it in a Radio Shack project box.  Here are some good instructions, followed by a sound sample of my finished product.