A few months’ gigging, recording and everything that goes with it – welcome to Guitarist ’s longter m test report
Many readers write in every year to share their pleasure in building kit guitars at home – which is a fine hobby to take up. But you really need a bit of space, ideally a well-equipped workbench in a garage, to do homebuild guitars. That’s doable for many people, but as a dad with weekends filled with trips to shops and parks, sometimes the only chunks of downtime I get are in the evenings after the little ’un’s gone to bed. Past about 10, however, and the clamour of routers and drills from the garage tends to be frowned upon by neighbours and it’s much more satisfying to do woodwork in daylight, where you can see fine details of your handiwork more easily. So maybe there’s something else I could build indoors, of a more desktop-friendly nature?
Gear editor Dave Burrluck comes to my rescue, suggesting a pedal kit from wellknown lutherie parts supplier StewMac. If I’m perfectly honest, I hadn’t realised the brand did them, but so it does – and the Ghost Drive, based on the Klon Centaur Professional Overdrive, looked ideal for an evenings-only project that posed an absorbing challenge but wasn’t so tricky it never got finished.The name Ghost Drive raises a smile – is that where poltergeists park their cars? I can see why all reference to mythical horses was avoided, but the spooky stickers that declare the kit pedal’s name may not make it onto my build! As it happens, I haven’t got any Klon-style pedals on my ’board at the moment, either, so there’s the added incentive of putting a new sound at my disposal to recommend it, too.
Ghost Town
A quick email to StewMac sends a kit winging my way and I was quite intrigued when it arrived. I have actually built a pedal before, a clone of a Echoplex preamp that I built from plans on the internet. It even worked when I finished it – precisely once, when I plugged it in for the first time – before falling silent forever, victim to an undiagnosed fault. To be fair, I ordered all the parts for that myself online and so the experience of building it was pretty spartan with no hand-holding or tips beyond those I received from friends with an interest in pedal-making.
So it was a pleasant surprise to open the StewMac Ghost Drive kit and find a really comprehensive manual included that not only covers step-by-step construction but gives a useful overview of the functions of the various components, complete with a guide to deciphe
