After getting my feet wet with my Danelectro T-Bone Distortion Pedal I wanted to keep up the momentum. My next victim would be my Danelectro BLT Slap Echo mini pedal. Like the T-bone the Danelectro BLT Slap Echo pedal is an extremely low cost and relatively simple pedal which makes it a perfect candidate for circuit bending.
The BLT Slap Echo consists of two circuit boards. The lower board (brown) is dedicated to driving the inputs and operating the foot switch. This lower board is identical to the one found on the T-Bone Pedal. Because it is not involved in effects creation I will be ignoring it while circuit bending.
The upper green board is where the magic happens. The upper board is driven by a PT2399S Digital Delay Analog Echo chip which is where I found the majority of the bend points. The second smaller IC is a simple TL072 op-amp which I largely ignored. One thing you will notice about these Danelectro mini pedals which makes them extremely pleasant to work with is that there are unused solder points throughout the circuit which can be easily connected to to create bends.
After probing the circuit board and some experimentation I settled on the points shown above. I soldered leads to each of these points using different colors to distinguish the different bends. Once the soldering was completed I also applied some glue to each solder point to hold the wires in place. This glue will keep the wires from tearing off the (admittedly weakly constructed) solder board and also prevent them moving around and touching other points.
From here I ran the wires out through the hole in the pedal case I had drilled and through the lid of the container I would use to house the switches. This container will likely be a temporary housing as it lacks the durability you need in a pedal. Down the road when I have the materials available I will create a post where I rehouse both the T-Bone pedal and the BLT Slap Echo into their own custom pedal boxes.
The first bend here is made by connecting the green and blue wires. This produces something of an infinite echo. rather than the echo decaying over time as it normally would it will continue until the bend is disconnected.
Next I used an on – off – on switch to connect the blue wire to either of the yellow wires. This bend creates a crunchy distorted echo effect. One of the yellow wires will give you a more treble base distortion, and the other will give you a more bass distortion. I have not tried it yet but I would be interested to know what happens if you wire the blue to the wiper on a potentiometer with the yellow on either side. You may be able to tune the pitch of the distortion this way. I expect I will attempt this when I rehouse the pedal.
Third I connected the red wires together. This is probably my favorite bend on this pedal. It is more subtly then some of the others but creates a really satisfying slow reverb effect that I really love.
The final bend was to connect the black and green wires. during testing this created a nice white noise effect behind the pedal output. Unfortunately though now that I have wired everything up it does not appear to be working. I’m not sure if I mixed up the solder points or if something came disconnected while I was closing up the circuit, but I will do some troubleshooting and provide an update if I can get it working again.
From there all that’s left is to box everything back up and get playing with it. I will be creating a video within the next few days to demonstrate the bends on both my T-Bone Distortion Pedal and this BLT Slap Echo pedal. Overall I’ve found these Danelectro pedals to be really rewarding and great way to initiate myself into the world of guitar pedal bending. Hope you all enjoyed and have a great week.