The Big Littler

Remember how I told you that my playing skills are pretty mediocre? Well, one skill I have yet to master is the use of the volume knob. I know, it's so simple, you say, but I play a lot of different guitars with various knob arrangements, so it's not an easy task. But who needs skill when you have technology, right?! The sound of an amp or overdrive with the volume backed off can be quite cool, and sometimes you need a boost for those massive solos. And sometimes, you just need good ol' rhythm tone. 

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The Big Littler gets its name from being able to make your signal big, or littler. Really, it is just a box with a volume attenuation circuit and a boost circuit. The volume attenuation can be buffered or not, selectable via a switch. The boost is inspired by the Naga Viper from Catalinbread, but with one of the pots swapped for a fixed resistor and it uses my favorite NPN silicon transistor, the 2N2222A. Why my favorite, you ask? It works well and the tin can mojo automagically makes me a better player, I'm certain of it.

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So why a project if it's so simple? Well, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, you may want to go from littler signal to big signal in one go. Regular old mechanical switching can't really handle this all that well. So, we use our friend, the ATTiny85 microcontroller to handle the switching for us. When you stomp on the littler switch, your signal gets littler. If you step on it again, you go back to normal. Simple, right? Well, if your signal is littler and you want to go straight to big, just stomp on the big switch and the microcontroller with take care of turning off the littler section and turning on the big section at the same time.

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This puts two great functions in one enclosure, and fits well in a 1590B. All the associated schematics, layout files, build documents, etc. can be downloaded here.