Is buying "How to Modify Guitar Pedals" worth it?

[eatyourguitar]

I dont know if its really necessary to write something complete when people that sell kits have such excellent step by step instructions. Byoc or diystompboxes are detailed complete kits. There are others as well. I just dont see how thats not enough. Use the beavis audio site for the pictures of wiring up the pcb to the jacks pots and power. The only thing better is having a dvd.

[jfrey]

I dont know if its really necessary to write something complete when people that sell kits have such excellent step by step instructions. Byoc or diystompboxes are detailed complete kits. There are others as well. I just dont see how thats not enough. Use the beavis audio site for the pictures of wiring up the pcb to the jacks pots and power. The only thing better is having a dvd.

I bought a few kits from ebay and some other sites, and in each of them instructions were either very poor, or non-existant. The BYOC kits are kind of expensive considering I have so many parts now already. I looked on DIY and they only have 1 kit in the store and it's a Taptation Tap Tempo Kit.

[culturejam]

I bought a few kits from ebay and some other sites, and in each of them instructions were either very poor, or non-existant. The BYOC kits are kind of expensive considering I have so many parts now already. I looked on DIY and they only have 1 kit in the store and it's a Taptation Tap Tempo Kit.

Most kits have crap for instructions. GGG is just okay, but better than most. BYOC is hands-down the best instructions.

And really, OLC documentation is very comprehensive. But the problem is that they take weeks to ship your order, and half the time the parts are wrong or parts are missing.

So if you need step-by-step instructions, and you want quality parts and accuracy of inventory, BYOC is really the only game in town. Like I said, GGG's docs are decent, but sometimes they gloss over things that people may want to know, and their wiring diagrams are quite non-intuitive.

[ifeellikeatourist]

I know this thread is kind of old, but I wanted to comment on the Brian wampler book for anyone still wondering. I own this book and while it was somewhat helpful, it is focused on doing circuit bending mods to pedals, not on building pedals. It tells you how to do some basic things and from there out it is just a bunch of sets of instructions for mods that you can do to popular pedals. For this reason I would say nobody really needs to buy this book. All of the mods in the book can be easily found online from someone here or at freestompboxes (or a basic google search). This book is also very disorganized and suffers from some serious formatting issues, which, for the price you pay, is quite frustrating.

If you want to know about building pedals from scratch and experimenting with your own mods and circuits, this is not the book for you. Furthermore, beavis audio is the best resource I've come across for people getting into this stuff and it's free. Also, as others have mentioned, one of the best ways to learn something is to just do it, starting out with a kit from ggg or byoc.

As far as books go, though, I would recommend nic collins' handmade electronic music book. It's not focused on guitar pedals, but has a lot of great info on bending and getting started making cool noisy circuits. It is also expensive, but unlike Wampler's book, the Collins book is very professionally put together, and it comes with an accompanying DVD so you can actually listen to sound samples of what the book is talking about, making it well worth the price.