ilovefuzz.com

Hey guys, so earlier today I bought a Boss DD-6 on the cheap ($40). The seller told me that there was some weirdness with pedal, but he didn't know if it was his AC adapter or the input jack.

I took the pedal home and played with it for about 20 minutes without issue. At this point in time the dd-6 was the only thing in the signal chain other than my bass and my amp. So about an hour or so later, I came back to the pedal and put it on my board. It worked well for several minutes, but then began fading my signal in and out, accompanied with some mild clipping/over-driven sounds. So I tried unplugging it from the 1 spot and powering it with a 9v battery, but the problem persists.

Any idea what the issue could be here? I don't have much knowledge about electrical circuiting, but it seems to me like it should be a relatively easy/inexpensive fix...? I hope Any advice you guys could give me would be much appreciated.
Thanks!

Two things come to mind.
If at some point the pedal was powered with the wrong adapter it may have damaged the power input components. Usually nothing more than a resistor, diode and electrolytic capacitor. If the resistor was damaged, but still kind of works it will get heat up after some use and the heat will make it more resistive lowering the power the pedal is getting. You'll likely see the LED dimming as well, but I don't know for sure.

Biasing- all the analog portions of the pedal have to be biased. This is usually done with a voltage divider made of two resistors and a capacitor. It would be odd for a newer pedal, but as electrolytics age they can leak current pulling down the bias voltage. More often they simply lose their ability as a capacitance and the result would be noise or hum.

brian m wrote:Two things come to mind.
If at some point the pedal was powered with the wrong adapter it may have damaged the power input components. Usually nothing more than a resistor, diode and electrolytic capacitor. If the resistor was damaged, but still kind of works it will get heat up after some use and the heat will make it more resistive lowering the power the pedal is getting. You'll likely see the LED dimming as well, but I don't know for sure.

Biasing- all the analog portions of the pedal have to be biased. This is usually done with a voltage divider made of two resistors and a capacitor. It would be odd for a newer pedal, but as electrolytics age they can leak current pulling down the bias voltage. More often they simply lose their ability as a capacitance and the result would be noise or hum.

If I made a video showing the glitchiness would it be easier to identify the issue?

Making a video is proving harder than I thought it would be. If it starts messing up I will go to get my video stuff and then it will be working fine again, and I can't really promt it to mess up in any way.

Assuming that the problem is one of those listed above, what would a recommended course of action for me be? I am not very electrically savvy.