The Danelectro Chicken Salad Vibrato (CSV). A great, low-cost pedal right out of the box, but you can improve it by re-housing it, and making a few simple modifications. I used an old rackmount case here, because such cases have plenty of holes already drilled.

Here's most of the parts needed, except for a few LEDs and a bunch of stranded wire.

From left to right:
Red switch, momentary. The original CSV uses a somewhat complicated switching system which doesn't allow for True Bypass. That's a problem if you want to pass your guitar signal straight through the pedal when it's off (not everyone worries about such things, but many do). I will use the momentary switch to activate the Vibrato effect, a DPDT to cut the 9v power On/Off, and another switch to bypass the signal. That's a whole lot of switchin' goin' on; you could do it all with a 3P3T switch if you want. The rackmount case I am using simply gave me a few switches to play with, so I used them.

Now another deviation from the original circuit. The first 2 pots in the photo will replace the "Speed" control pot on the original. That might seem to violate the Ockham's Rule of Gizmos: never use more components than you need. And a single ganged 100k pot is faithful to Danelectro's design. But you can get some groovy, out-of-sync vibe sounds if you use two separate 100k pots, and set them at different values. You can even tweak the two 100k pots to the point that the effect just makes a sort of "klop. . . klop" sound, which means that the pedal's sort of oscillating. Tweak them out of synch the other direction, and you can get a wah or envelope-follower sound. You can't get that with the original circuit.

The 3rd pot in the photo replaces the original "Intensity" control pot. I used a 50k; you can substitute anything in that vicinity. Linear, audio taper, it doesn't really matter.

The 4th pot is 100 ohm (not 100k) and replaces the trimpot in the original. I used a super-precise 1k pot that I had lying around. It turns over 20 times from stop to stop, which lets you get very delicate with the setting. Again, just a preference thing. I've used 100r with no problems.

At the bottom of the photo is a "Boss style" jack. You could get by with a metal jack if you rewired your power supply, but that can get complicated if you also house the pedal in a metal case, so I won't go into that here.

On the two 1/4 inch jacks to the right, note that the ground terminals are connected with a single wire. I put an "O" (for output) label on one to help me keep it straight as I'm installing it.

Removing the control knobs and the bottom panel.

With the cover removed, you can see the small screws that secure the two PCBs to the housing. It takes a bit of wiggle, but you can slide the PCBs out once you remove those tiny phillips-head screws.

The lower PCB routes the 9v and the guitar's signal. It also has the switch on it. The PCB connects to the upper PCB via a ribbon cable of 6 wires. The white plastic connector at the end of that cable will detach if you jam a knife blade or a fingernail into the base of the connector where its male/female ends meet.

Some re-housing tutorials recommend that you toss the lower PCB. That's unnecessary, unless you just like to solder. The lower PCB gets the 9 volts into shape (so to speak), and were you to discard it, you'd then have to re-construct another circuit to do that. It's easiest just to re-use the lower PCB.

The photo shows the lower PCB, detached, with a screwdriver pointing to the 9v negative post on the power jack. Connect a fairly heavy wire to that and route it to your power switch(es). At some point, you will also need to connect that wire to the grounds of your In/Out jacks.

In the photo, I have snipped (not pried) off the top of the 9v jack, which let me peel back the inner strip inside. Be careful not to pull the jacks free from the PCB when you are peeling away the plastic on them. Incidentally, the strip is the positive (+) connection. While some people might prefer to solder directly to the PCB, I usually don't go that route. The jack is soldered to the PCB, so I piggy-back onto what's already in place. In general, I solder as little as possible onto the PCB, and not just because I'm in a hurry to actually play guitar. You can easily fry some sensitive components with the soldering iron, so the less it meets up with the PCB, the better.

Now, in the top photo, I am giving the inside of the cable jacks a good snip (not a twist or a pry). Once you get some clearance into the inside of the jack, stop. You only need to remove enough plastic so you can see the strip of metal, and trace the + and - connections.

If you're unsure of which wires go where, gently insert an actual cable into the jack, and watch where the tip and sleeve connect. Tip = positive or hot, sleeve = ground.

If you look at some of the photos later in the tutorial, you'll see how I wired the jacks. Do it however you want, as long as you keep In and Out positives separate. Grounds should join each other. Although this step seems easy, it's wise to double-check your connections with a meter.

Now disassemble the switch (the blue plastic square in the 1st photo). With the switch taken apart, you'll see that there are two main solder connections on the bottom (see 2nd photo). The pencil in the photo is pointing to them. In this case, just solder one wire each directly to those. I ran these wires to a momentary pushbutton switch. But a regular DPDT will work, if you get used to the unorthodox movement of the switch (you'd have to switch it On and then Off again, but it would work).

A closeup of the connections on the lower PCB. From the top, left to right.... (1) is the green wire connected to the Output hot signal. The blue wire (2) is connecting the grounds. The blue/white wire (3) is connected to the Input hot lead. The short red wire (4) connects the two grounds. On the 9v power jack, the red wire (5) is positive. It's hard to see, but there's a black wire right next to it for the 9v negative.

The upper PCB in this photo has metal supports (circled in pink) that hold the pots in the PCB. Although the supports won't be in your way, the shells on the pots must go. Take a tiny screwdriver and pry the small tabs on the bottom of the shells. Then remove them and reveal the innards. If you do this correctly, you'll have the bottom plate of each pot still attached to the PCB.

The pot shells and the insides removed from their mounting plates. With the shells removed, you need to somehow break the circular part of the mounting plates, since the plates have electrical conductors on them (conductors you no longer need). I just break them apart with pliers. The next few photos make this a bit clearer.

This photo shows the important part of the pot mounting plates. The shell is still on in this photo, but once you remove it, you can solder your wires to these lugs as I have done in the photos below.

Here you can see how I broke the mounting plate. On the left, the red, green, and brown wires are now soldered onto the lugs. On the right, you can see where the pot used to be mounted (note the circle drawn on the PCB). This isn't an exact science, and when I was breaking the mounting plate apart, the whole schmeer just came loose from the PCB. If this happens to you, don't panic, just pay attention to where the lugs went into the PCB.

On the right, if you look closely, you'll see that there are 4 connections. I used (from the top to bottom), a green, red, lite blue, and dark blue wire. Although this pot is essentially two pots connected, only 2 of the lugs are used on each pot, so that's why you only have 4 wires, not 6.

This is an optional step. The original CSV circuit includes a trimpot. What it does in the circuit is sort of complicated, but here's what you need to know. Slight adjustments to the yellow plastic button on the trimpot affect the "ooomph" of the vibrato.

There are ways that you can leave the trimpot intact, and adjust it through the new housing. But since you're already replacing pots, it makes sense to replace the trimpot with a regular pot. Then, you can adjust that without opening up the casing. As before, pry away the metal tabs that hold the shell of the trimpot, and lift the guts off. The trimpot is not as robust as the regular pots, but the mechanism is generally the same.

Here you can see the soldered red, yellow, and blue wire on the lugs that were coming off the trimpot. Be quick with the soldering iron, because as you don't want the ICs next to the trimpot to get too warm.

Another optional step. On the underside of the upper PCB, there is a small black circle (inside the pink scribble on the photo) with two bare wires coming out of it. If you look closely, you'll also see that there is a + and a - marked on the PCB next to those wires. The wires are coming from a small bulb inside the black box on the other side of the PCB. The bulb pulses according to the settings of the pots, and that in turn modulates the vibrato effect.

As the bulb pulses, it provides a visual indication of how you have the pedal set (very useful if you are playing on stage, and aren't able to bend down to see where the knobs are set). Cool, sure, but with the original design, the bulb is hidden inside the pedal housing, so the user will never know, visually anyway.






The solution is to attach 2 wires, a resistor, and an LED. Just connect one wire to each of the small bare wires coming out of the black circle. (One wire must have the resistor on it, or you'll smoke the LED). Now the new LED will display the "tempo," for lack of a better term, of your pedal as it's operating.

A few rehousing tutorials recommend that you tinker with the bulb assembly and the thingy inside it (called an LDR). Usually the rationale has to do with getting a brighter light, or making the interior of the black box more reflective. That sounds promising in theory, and who doesn't like a good reflection? In practice, the results are somewhat uneven, so I don't recommend it.

In the original pedal design, there is a red LED in the middle of the housing to show when the pedal is getting power. If you want to retain that feature, you have to clip the original LED leads, and connect a wire to each one. Run those wires to a new LED (no resistor required here). I recommend using a socket of sorts on the end of your wires, so that you can change the LED easily if you install it backwards (it happens), or if you just want to try a different color.

In the photo, you can see that I used a yellow and a green wire for this, and simply left the original LED connected to one of the leads coming out of the PCB. I bent it out of the way, and soldered the new wire beneath it. (I told you I was lazy.) Note that this entire step is optional, since you might cut corners by using a switch that visibly indicates whether the power is on, as some DPDTs can.

Now to the housing. The large white PCB that you see in mine was in the original rackmount gear. As you can see, I cleared most of the components off the white PCB, but left some. I keep the board itself in there, so that I can anchor the CSV to it.

The photo shows the installed 9v jack on the back panel, with its black and yellow wires going to the DPDT on the far right. (The pot that you see attached in the middle of the front panel is not functional. It only helps secure the board to the lower metal sheet.)

An aerial view of the modded CSV, with all the pots and jacks installed. Next to the 9v jack, on the back panel is the momentary switch.

A closer view. As you can see, the blue and green wires make their way from the old In/Out jacks on the lower PCB, and eventually end up at the front panel, at the new jacks mounted there now. The wires take a detour at a DPDT switch on the front panel (toward the left in the photo). That switch permits true bypass, but remember, you can skip that if.

The twisted brown and yellow wires connect the "tempo" LED that I've mounted below the two pots on the front panel. (Note the resistor on one wire. I used a Yell/Purp/Brown resistor, and a beefy one at that, but there's a lot of flexibility there.) Although the grounds or negative leads are eventually connected, you do not connect them to the metal housing, or the backs of the pots, etc. This differs from the standard method used with ground circuits inside guitars and amplifiers.

The DPDT switch in the lower middle of the photo is optional. It breaks the circuit to one of the lugs on the pot immediately to its right. I found that this gives a slight change in tone, or maybe "character" is a better term. It's not a significant change, so you could easily ignore that step.

A few final steps.... make sure that your wires are firmly connected, even if only to each other. In addition, use solid core wire, plastic ties, string, or whatever to separate the soldered wires, and to route them in a coherent way. If the whole thing should drop (it's not a bad idea to drop test), you don't want the strain to be taken by the solder connections or the wires.

Next, I use heavy gauge wire, run through an open hole on the PCBs, to hold everything in place. In the photo, you can see where I have done this with the red wire in the middle of the photo. It goes through both PCBs, and then connects to a hole in the large board underneath. The thick green wire at the leftmost end of the PCB serves the same function. I ended up with excess wire running to the power switch, so I made sure to bundle that up too.

Lastly, you can see a small piece of plastic sheeting between the upper and lower PCBs. That makes sure that they do not short each other out. When I placed the cover on the housing, I secured another sheet on top of the PCB that you are looking at, so that it won't contact the metal box. Why not use screws to hold the PCBs? You could, but I never really liked that. The actual mass of the PCBs is minimal, and a stiff wire will hold them fine. Plus, if you bolt the PCBs down, any physical shocks to the housing will transfer to the PCBs. With the method I use, they are sort of spring-loaded.

Double check that the thing works before boxing it up, put some knobs on, and you're done.

Looks good, sounds good, but what if all of this is a bit much for you? If you aren't into wires, jacks, and switches, but you still want to sound cool, you can simply replace the trimpot with a micro sized pot and an LED. That gives you another control parameter, and you can fit the pot and the LED into the space that is ordinarily taken up by the battery.

I've modded a few Danelectro pedals that way, and it's easy. There's more than enough room in the battery slot for the pot, and for the LED which indicates tempo. Heck, you could probably throw a switch in there for true bypass.

If you're interested in the audio benefits of all this destruction and reconstruction, I've recorded some sound clips at the link below. The clips give you a sense of how it all should work when you're done.

http://www.esnips.com/web/SoundClipsCSVtutorial