29 June 2013

Ditto Looper Pedal: LED Color Blind Mod


Click on image to enlarge

I was recently asked to replace a dual-color LED in a TC Electronics Ditto Looper pedal. The person requesting the change has a variation of color blindness that prevents him from distinguishing red from green, and those are the two colors in the Ditto's LED. I chickened out pretty quickly, though, and never even opened the Ditto to look. I didn't feel like frying something and being stuck with $130 non-working pedal. Instead I came up with a solution that did not risk any damage to the pedal and did not affect the pedal's value or warranty.

I had some 3-D glasses on hand (Red and Blue) and cut the lenses out. I cut two little squares—one of each color—and stuck them side-by-side on a piece of tape. I placed the tape over the LED so that the line between red and blue was right in the middle of the LED. Green would have been a better choice than blue, obviously, but I went with what I had on hand, and this seems to work well as is.

Because the red lens makes the red LED brighter and the green darker than it would be ordinarily, and the blue lens makes the red darker and green brighter, when the LED is red, the left half of the lens lights up. When the LED is green, the right half lights up.

There are surely countless ways to make this solution look better, but this quick, cheap and easy solution works in a pinch.

16 October 2012

Guitar Fetish (GFS): Low Quality Products, Low Quality Customer Service

Not only does GFS sell extremely low quality products, you will probably have to pay for shipping to return them. Here are pictures of a strat body I bought. The holes did not even come close to lining up with the holes on my Fender-licensed neck (which lined up perfectly with the previous three Strat bodies it was on). So I contacted GFS, and I got a pretty impersonal reply telling me to return the body. When they received it, I was refunded the purchase price, but was not reimbursed for shipping it back (about $10). It seems like they could have eaten the $10 and made it back (and then some) in my ensuing purchases (of which there would have been many). Short-sightedness loses once again.

Here are the pics. It might not be too obvious how crooked these holes are, but as you know, the opposite corners of a rectangle should be the same distance apart (Top left to bottom right = Top right to bottom left). Clearly not the case here.