Designing a low-cost solution for guitarists in Ghana who cannot afford to import effect pedals

Abstract

Music is a very important part of the Ghanaian society and it serves many purposes. In more recent times, the guitar has been one of the most widely used melodic instruments in music production. With the invention of the effect pedal, guitarists worldwide have been able to use a wider variety of tones to produce more complex and enjoyable music. In Ghana, however, these pedals need to be imported and this prevents a lot of guitarists from having a lot of tones to choose from which impedes their craft primarily because the cost of the pedal increases significantly while access to the pedal locally is restricted. Often software implementations of the effect pedals are used as substitutes for their hardware counterparts, but this comes at a cost of the reduction in tone quality. In this project, a low-cost effect pedal is designed and built to suit the needs of guitarists who cannot afford imported effect pedals.