Anomalous menu logo

Custom Orders #1

February 15, 2023

Here’s a trio of custom orders conceived of, built, and sold recently. Enjoy!

Momentary Tremolo with Hand Painted Artwork

The front of the Momentary Tremolo pedal showing hand painted artwork of a raven in flight.
The inside of the Momentary Tremolo pedal showing point-to-point wiring.

This customer needed a tremolo pedal that only activated when the footswitch was pressed. An interesting idea with very specific uses. One case (and the reason my customer needed it) is to play the song Love Like Winter by AFI.

This circuit is rather simple. It uses an op-amp to generate a square wave LFO which turns a transistor on and off. The transistor then passes the guitar signal when on and cuts it when off. Controls are rate and depth. To make it a momentary effect, I used the Stutter footswitch (momentary DPDT) from the STUTTER/SILENCE with no LED.

Julie painted an incredible raven onto the GORVA C65.

Hand-operated STUTTER/SILENCE

The front of the hand-operated Stutter Silence pedal showing the splattered white-on-black paintwork, the toggle switch, and the lever switch on top.
The inside of the hand-operated Stutter Silence pedal showing the point-to-point wiring.
The bottom of the hand-operated Stutter Silence pedal showing the block lettered ANOMALOUS logo.

Building custom-made effects pedals can bring in some really interesting ideas and novelties. For instance, this custom order was for a rapper who played the keytar! I don’t think there are many of those around!

He wanted a STUTTER/SILENCE that could be mounted to the strap button of his keytar and that he could use by hand. Seeing as no LED would be needed, I sourced a SPDT toggle switch and a momentary SPDT push-button lever. This combination is so tactile and and satisfying to use, like a mechanical keyboard. And, since it’s being used for a keytar, it needed to pass a balanced signal, so it can even be used with a microphone.

Olivia’s The Last Of Us Distortion

The front of the pedal showing a hand painted portrait of a clicker zombie from HBO's The Last Of Us. It is opening its mouth menacingly and has a large mushroom growing out of its head, covering its eyes.
The inside of the Last of Us pedal showing point-to-point wiring.
The side of The Last Of Us pedal showing yellow slime mold wrapping all the way around the side.
The side of The Last Of Us pedal showing yellow slime mold wrapping all the way around the side.
The side of The Last Of Us pedal showing yellow slime mold wrapping all the way around the side.
The side of The Last Of Us pedal showing yellow slime mold wrapping all the way around the side.

A good friend of mine just picked up the electric guitar after playing classical guitar for a while. She bought a tiny amp which only does clean sounds, and she was looking for a pedal to fill that gainy/overdrive gap.

Every week, we get together with a group of friends and watch HBO’s The Last Of Us at mine and Julie’s apartment. We get a kick out of the show, not only because it’s incredible, but also because it was filmed in our city, so it’s fun to point out the locations we know.

I made this distortion pedal for her and painted a clicker zombie on the front with slime mold wrapping around the sides.

Check out this video from my Instagram Stories where I detail every aspect of building this pedal.