Cam McVey

A good friend of mine was talk­ing about his gui­tar pedal board and some issues he was hav­ing with a couple of ped­als on there. I offered to have a look. Instead of rak­ing around in the guts of his decades-old pedal to make it true bypass, I figured it would be easier to con­struct some­thing that would allow him to leave his pedal on all the time, but to com­pletely remove it from the audio sig­nal when not needed. I sat down and sketched out an idea that I thought would work and then pro­ceeded to get the parts and assemble it.

THEN I had the bright idea of check­ing online to see if any­one else had done such a thing and what, if any­thing, I had missed in my design. Of course, plenty of folks make these type of devices all the time, so no inven­tion here. Ah well!

Well all the stuff arrived and I pulled it together over a week or so — an hour here, an after­noon there — and the Loopy Deux was born. I named “Loopy Deux” because it loops and there’s two of them. I had “Loopy Doo” in my head and real­ised that “doo” (deux) in French means “two”, so the name stuck! I learned some things through it and had to assemble a num­ber of tools to pro­duce it which will come in handy for the next two pro­jects being born out of this one.

The nice thing about this pedal is that it solves more than one prob­lem. It’s great for remov­ing a par­tic­u­larly noisy or tone-sucking pedal out of the audio sig­nal, but the other nice thing is that it can help you set up sev­eral ped­als into a par­tic­u­lar sound by allow­ing you to switch them all off or on with a single switch instead of dan­cing around, try­ing to get them all switched as fast as possible.

I have some ideas on addi­tional fea­tures that would make the pedal even more use­ful (buf­fers, blend pots, etc.), but that will have to wait until ver­sion deux!

Here’s some pho­tos of the vari­ous stages.

By the way, if you are inter­ested in get­ting some­thing sim­ilar made, let me know — I’m always up for a challenge!