Homemade footswitch for Yamaha G100-iii
I really love solid state amps and a while ago I finally got my hands on an old Yamaha G100iii head. It came in really good condition, only missing the reverb tank and the footswitch. Reverb tank was easy to get as a new spare part but the original footswitch is almost unobtainable nowadays.Since Yamaha is always doing its very own thing, there's no other functioning and compatible footswitch than the original one.
After doing some research I stumbled across the original service manual including a detailed wiring scheme of the footswitch. So I decided to build my own.
It's a fairly umcommon wiring, using different combinations of resistor values and LEDs to engage 3 different functions.
Since I built it from scratch I also decided to improve the visibility of the switch functions by painting different color fields onto the housing, each matching the knob color of the amp function it engages.
Red is FX Loop, green/blue are Channel A/B and yellow is Parametric EQ
I also added a Yamaha decal. This was my very first project of this kind, my soldering skills had been limited to guitar wirings before but now I started working on pedals too. The resistors I used are ridiculously oversized though and I wired the LEDs wrong at first.😄
Nonetheless I'm really happy about the result, the footswitch works flawlessly and it matches the amp really well. 🙂