GROW YOUR OWN

Our editor tries his hand at a DIY overdrive

One of the more interesting invites we received at NAMM this year was to attend a ‘build your own overdrive pedal’ workshop held by Nu:Tekt, which turns out to be a division of Korg devoted to DIY electronic devices. Intrigued, we strolled down to the Nu:Tekt booth along with colleagues from MusicRadar and GuitarWorld to take our places at a kind of picnic table upon which some paper plans had been set out like placemats. Two crisply suited Japanese engineers were assigned to our table of guitar journos and they politely but firmly steered our bumbling efforts through the construction process – which instantly (and pointlessly) became a competition to see who could build theirs first. The editor of this tome, unfortunately, suffered an early setback after installing the PCB before the all-important battery cushion was in place, which cost him precious minutes of reassembly time.

Despite this unofficial race to the finish the whole thing proved quite an absorbing process. The main printed circuit board was soon fitted with a single NuTube (in very crude terms that’s a flat triode valve that’s turned up in a lot of nice-sounding Vox gear lately) and the rest of the parts screwed and slotted into place one by one. Further DIY modification of individual components was not only possible but encouraged, we were told.

When we got it home and plugged the Nu:Tekt OD-S in we found, to our amazement, that the pedal actually worked and indeed made nice, crisp drive sounds, though rather on the bright side in this base-spec unit. So if you’ve a yen for modding but don’t like to get too technical, this interesting DIY project range, which includes synths and headphone amps, is well worth a look – the range can only grow with time. The overdrive kit costs £229, which is a little pricy, but the potential for tonal experimentation is huge.