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Channel Pedal LED's


chaeridley

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I've got a Marshall Channel Pedal with 2 buttons. One for reverb, one for the channels. It doesn't have LED's to show when the button has been pressed. Sometime on stage I can't tell if the reverb is on or off. I'd like to install LED's if possible or find a pedal with LED's.

 

Any help?

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If it just uses a stereo 1/4" jack any similar footswitch will do. There are guys on Ebay who sell ones identical to the official Marshall jobs, just without the name stamped on, otherwise something like a Boss FS6 will do the trick.

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All you have to do is wire an led parallel to the wires coming from the footswitch jack. So the tip of the jack goes to a lug on the switch, connect the positive side of an LED to the same lug. The sleeve of the jack goes to another lug on the switch, connect the negative side of the LED to that lug. Oh remember to put a resistor before the positive side of the LED. I can't remember the value. 10k or something?

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So simply connect the LED directly to the positive and negative with a resister in between the positives. But you aren't sure what resistance. I would like a 2 color one for the distortion button and a 1 color one for the reverb one. I don't need to have external power for them?

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Two colour for the distortion? do you have two distortion channels? If so things are a tiny bit more complicated.

You may not need external power. I copied my resistor values from an actual footswitch for my amp, and it works fine, but it doesn't work on the remote jack of my DS-2 pedal, so you do have to experiment with values. Either your amp won't change channels or your resistor will be too bright and eventually die.

What I did was plug a cable into the channel jack on the amp, then press an led+resistor to the tip/sleeve on the other side to see what happens.

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Originally posted by chaeridley

Well that guy just wired them directly in between. I guess I can just try that and see what happens. Anyone else have any luck doing this. ANd for the guy that got this to work for the marshall, can you post your schematic?

 

 

I never drew one. It's very simple though. The tip and sleeve of the jack socket are connected to two adjacent lugs on the switch (you'll either have 2 or 3 lugs in a row). Then you connect a resistor to the same lug as the tip, connect the resistor to the positive side of the led, then connect the negative side of the led to the same lug as the sleeve.

 

It looks like with the peavey amps, they connect tip to sleeve to get the distortion channel, and there's enough voltage in there to power an LED along the way. With the marshall amps, you connect the tip and sleeve to ge tthe clean channel. You use the led+resistor to lower the voltage to the point where the amp doesnt have enough to change channels, so it lights up, but doesn't change to clean. The trick to having them in paralel means that when you 'short' the switch the electricity takes the 'short' cut and the led stays off.

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