Pedal Build · Acapulco Gold Clone · Gift Build

When a pedal has one knob, you already know what it's about. There's no spectrum of polite sounds to dial in. There's just how much. The Dead Planet: Mephisto was built for that exact purpose — to inspire doom in anyone who plugs into it.

This one was made for Stephen, my bandmate in The Heirs of the Supernova. Our album Antithesis is built around the mythology of the Dead Planet, so naming this pedal after it felt right. The circuit is a clone of the Earthquaker Devices Acapulco Gold — a single-knob fuzz that delivers exactly what doom requires: a wall of sound that screams through your amp. Huge, angry, uncompromising.

The enclosure got treatments that most pedals never see. My friend Chris — honorary third member of the band — helped bring it to life by 3D printing the lettering and the planet itself. The font was chosen to match the tone of the story. The lettering is raised off the surface. Chris colored it dark with just a hint of metal, which is exactly the aesthetic Mephisto deserves. The single knob is the planet. The footswitch is blacked out, keeping every detail in theme.

Stephen loved it. He uses it at home when he's playing and writing — which, for a doom pedal, is exactly where it belongs.

Pedal Build · Greer Lightspeed Clone · Gift Build

Matt and I have been making music together for a long time. The Loyolas has never been the most consistent band on the timeline — we've lived apart, life has intervened — but there's always been music to work on, and I've always loved helping him find his tone. Radiation Detected was built for him, and the concept came out of one of our conversations. The exact spark is lost to time, but the result speaks for itself.

The circuit is the Greer Lightspeed Overdrive — one of my favorites, and a perfect fit for Matt's dirty, bluesy playing style. He was blown away when he got it, which honestly isn't surprising. That circuit does the work.

The enclosure is white, and the visual concept is where this one really comes alive. The controls are renamed after parts of a Geiger counter: Geiger, Dose, and Alpha. The LED, glowing green against the white enclosure, is labeled "Radiation Detected" — it only lights up when the pedal is active, which means the radiation is live. Electric purple knobs round out a color palette that has no business being this exciting on a guitar pedal.

Renaming the controls is one of my favorite parts of the design process. It's a small thing, but it pulls the whole concept together and makes the pedal feel like its own world rather than just another overdrive on a pedalboard.

Pedal Build · Greer Lightspeed Clone · Gift Build

Every guitar I've ever played, every band I've been in, every pedal I've built — it all traces back to one person. My uncle Tommy got me into guitar when I was in elementary school, and that was it. The whole thing started there. The Tommy Gun is my way of saying thank you.

Tommy loves a great clean tone, so I built him one of my favorite circuits: a clone of the Greer Lightspeed Overdrive. The best way I can describe it is "more better everything." It takes your existing tone and adds just the right amount of gain and drive to accentuate its natural harmonics — no mid-bump, no color, just your sound made more of itself.

The design evokes tommy gun iconography in my own style. The LED is labeled "Reload." The tone knob uses a weapon sight as its indicator, with T-O-N-E marked around the major positions. The top face is covered in printed paper sealed with clear coat — waterslide doesn't hold up well over black. And as a final touch, the footswitch is bronze, the color of a bullet casing.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about building pedals for people is the time it takes. Sourcing components, designing the enclosure, working through the build — all of it gives you space to think about the person you're making it for. With this one, I had a lot to think about.

Pedal Build · EQD Life Clone · Gift Build

Every builder has a pedal that taught them everything. For me, that was the Voidbreaker. My second build ever, and the first I made for someone else — my bandmate Stephen. It was challenging in ways I hadn't anticipated, and it gave me lessons I still carry into every build since.

The circuit is a clone of the Earthquaker Devices Life pedal — a modified RAT with an octave function, and not an easy build. The sheer number of components makes troubleshooting tedious when something goes wrong, and something always goes wrong. The COVID lockdown gave me the time to work through it patiently, and I got there in the end.

The concept draws from the albums Stephen and I make together — Instruments For Declination and Songs Within A Collapsed Star — conceptual records set in a story that spans another galaxy. The Voidbreakers are an elite fighting force within that story, and the pedal was designed to carry their identity. Gold, white, and candy blue — colors of honor and rank. A large triangular pattern runs across the face, inspired by the ship designs in Star Fox, sitting somewhere between a star fighter's hull and its cockpit control panel.

This build pushed my spray painting and waterslide technique further than anything I'd done before. When Stephen posted it on Reddit, commenters started asking where they could get one. That was a real moment. It's a 1 of 1, and it's staying that way.

I'm proud of this one in a way that's hard to fully explain. It's not just the pedal — it's everything it represents about how far the craft has come since that first build.

To visually pair with Stephen’s Voidbreaker I designed the Saturus. It has a high gain distortion based of a Mesa Boogie. Not sure why but there’s a ringing in the tone that can’t figure out. But I like it and was proud to tackle it as my second diy pedal. It allowed me to have fun with the planet design and practice my water slide technique.

Pedal Build · EQD Life Clone

Every pedal build starts with a concept — the circuit is only half of it. The Red Winter began with a song.

The PCB is a clone of the Earthquaker Devices Life pedal — a heavily modified RAT circuit with an octave function bolted on. It's unruly by design, the kind of high-gain distortion that doesn't sit politely in a mix. More untamed than most RAT variants. I've built this board a few times now, so the circuit itself was familiar ground. This time the enclosure concept came from one of our band's songs.

The name comes from a song off our album — a record built around a pilot stranded alone on the Dead Planet Mephisto, fighting to survive until rescue comes. "The Red Winter" is one of the heavier moments on it. The lyrics sit somewhere between environmental dread and the kind of helplessness that comes from watching catastrophe unfold in slow motion: Will we only see the way / When we've run out of days. It's a powerful song dynamically, and it needed a pedal that matched that energy.

The visual concept was simple: snow and blood. The enclosure came white out of the box, which made things easier — no paint, just intention. Red graphics contrast hard against the white body. Black metal hardware creeps in as a third element, representing the shadows and death that follow battle across a frozen landscape. The colors aren't decorative. They're the story.

Graphics were done with waterslide decals, which came together cleanly on the build.

The sound suits the song. The Life circuit is powerful and a little chaotic — metal and hard rock territory, with that raw edge a standard RAT doesn't quite have. When the red winter calls, it's loud.

Continuing the theme of the Voidbreaker and Saturus, the Final Beacon is a delay pedal. Like a last call that continues from the outer edge of space to its final destination. I had this pedal designed years before I got around to making it. It wasn’t hard, just taping off the spray lines and carefully adding the water slide decal.