My good pal Olek from Father Moon reached out to ask for a specific pedal he needed for his board. He wanted a basic killswitch that cut his signal like a tuner pedal does but with more control and without having to activate the tuner. When I asked if he wanted it to be latched (stay on/off) or momentary (only on/off when held down), his response was “…both?” Challenge accepted!
It was going to be a simple circuit, so I needed to use a small enclosure, but it would have been clumsy to fit both footswitches on the bottom in a normal configuration. I instead decided to design the pedal horizontally to give more room between the footswitches – but of course, it can be mounted on a board vertically like a normal pedal.
Considering this was such a simple and versatile pedal, I thought others might be interested in buying one too. And so, I did something else I had never done before, designed it to be repeatable. All my other pedals since then have been unique, one-off pedals or small batches of hand-built pedals. But for this one, I made a drilling template, designed a stencil that would be cut out with a Silhouette machine and applied with white acrylic paint, and made sure to use easily sourced components.
The components list is very small, the two main components being the latched and the momentary footswitches. The latched footswitch, named Silence, clicks the signal on and off. The momentary footswitch, named Stutter, adds the signal back when held down, or cuts the signal depending on whether Silence is on or off. And the LED (powered by the optional 9V input) reflects both footswitch positions, lighting up when signal is passed through and not when signal is cut.
The Stutter/Silence ended up being my most popular pedal to date! It’s one of my most enjoyable pedals to build due to its simplicity and how it always comes out looking awesome and slightly different due to the randomness of applying the paint.
