Making a Tempo
Controller Box
for the Boss DD-5 Digital Delay
If you have the Boss DD-5 digital delay, it requires an external controller
to vary the delay time. Boss offers one, the FS-5U. It works fine, but when
real estate is at a premium on your pedal board, it is a lot larger than necessary.
So I made my own.
As you can see, the controller can be much, much smaller than the
one Boss offers.
The one I made started out as an
2-3/4"x2-1/8"x1-5/8" aluminum box, one of several
that were given to me by a friend of mine. I cut the enclosure
down so that the front is about 3/4" high and the rear is
about 1-1/4" high.
The circuitry involved is about as simple as it gets. Get a normally
open SPST momentary switch and a mono open-circuit 1/4" jack from RadioShack. Then you connect a wire from the jack's tip to one side of the
switch, and another wire from the jack's sleeve to the other side
of the switch. That's all there is to it!
You just plug a 1/4" mono patch cord from the tempo jack on
the delay pedal into the jack on the controller and you're all
ready to go. It should cost around $10 to make one of these and
about 1 hour or so to manufacture it. Another nice benefit of this little box, it that it is a lot
easier to set the delay time than with the Boss FS-5U. It doesn't
require near as much effort.