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After having a long talk with my buddy last night I came to the realization that I think I'll always like tweaking knobs and blinking lights more than actually PLAYING my instrument
I have a semi decent grasp on how to solder. I'm sure my stuff isn't near as clean as you guys, but with some practice again I'd be pretty proficient. My dad used to be an electrician before he retired so I'm hoping he'll be able to shoot me some pointers as well
BUTTTTTTT basically I'm curious if you guys started off with a BYOC kit or if ya just did some research and parted it out yourself. I'm not gonna lie, after posting this I might go take some cheapo pedals I never use, gut them and start replacing stuff randomly to see if I can get some weird noises haha.
Research and experimentation. Fuzz Face built with parts scavenged from various broken electronics, PTP. It worked so I got some perf board and some store bought parts and built a better one. You can build like 3~4 Fuzz Faces for the cost of buying one in the store. And don't get me started on those "special edition" ones...
I'm still starting but I've now built a Muff, a Superfuzz a feedback looper and 2 Fuzz Faces all from kits and a Shin Ei FY2 on vero. I got into it because I want to be able to control my sound without having to buy more stuff or rely on other people. It's amazing what a few quid's worth of bits can do when you know how to order them. And I like the magic of being able to perceive all the invisible, complex microscopic electrical activity that's taking place in a circuit, and interact with it musically.
I started when I was mad that all the pedals I missed out on over the years and wanted were going for well over $300 each and they were circuits that were based on other circuits. So I thought why not see if I can build and mod existing circuits and gave it a try. I had most of the tools since soldering was not foreign to me since I was a game console modder for several years. I started with Vero layouts (strip boards) since it was easy to pick up but I found after a few months and several builds later that I had better results with etching my own PCBs. So now I troll around and look for PCB layouts as I am still learning Eagle to make my own. It is a continual learning process. My very first build was a Electra Distortion and I still love it.
The BYOC kits are good hands-on experience and most of them are actually really good pedals as well. Only thing is, you won't really learn much about the electronics of a circuit or tone-bending. But you will learn the basics that most people don't think about or have always taken for granted. Like how to wire a 3pdt switch, how to solder, how to wire jacks, how to fit all that stuff in a pedal, etc. The instructions they give you are decent (but could be much better, IMO) but their forum is great so you'll have someone to walk you through your first build.
You can also try just starting from scratch. If you do this, I would take a pretty simple build like a booster or very basic fuzz and I would order a large enclosure. Maybe even absurdly large like 1590BB.
For the electronics, I think you just need to look at a lot of schematics. The BYOC kits are PCB-by-numbers so you really don't learn much by putting C1 in the box labelled C1.
But if you do a little reading, you can start playing mad scientist pretty fast. Like anytime you see one of half a dozen opamps, you can replace that opamp with any one of the others. Anytime you see a transistor, you can replace it with 5-6 similar transistors with different gain. If you see two diodes in parallel going opposite directions, those are clipping diodes and you can swap them. A low pass filter always looks the same, as does a high pass filter. So whenever you see one of those, you know you can replace the parts right there if you want more or less of a frequency.
If you're totally stuck, you know you can always replace any resistor with a pot which then makes it a knob to be twiddled. A lot of times there's a reason those things aren't knobs (it either has little impact, or most values sound terrible) but experimenting is half the fun. You're not really working with much power so in general the worst thing that happens is you get no sound or awful sound. It's not like an amp where a mistake could kill you.
I got started out of just being curious and broke. I always thought it would be great to shape your own sound and as a hobby it's just fun. I did things the harder way but am glad I did. If I were to start again I would do some prefabbed pcbs first. Actually, with my beginning solder skills I would have fried so many pads!
The first thing I built was a breadboard circuit. If I could build it there and I liked the sound then I could perf it and make it sound the same. Now I don't perf. Been making my own etched pcbs or downloading available ones or buying prefabs. I still think its best to bread board with the same parts( mostly) do the tweaking of values and then populate a board.
I just breadboarded an acetone Fuzzmaster to stock values and it sounded like total fucking shit. After finding the right things to tweak it sounds like fucking Satan now.
eatyourguitar wrote:started as a way to get everything for free but damn was I wrong
TRUTH! But it feels so damn good to build it with your two hands.. or one hand and your hook hand if you dont have medical insurance and love DIY stuff and living on the edge.
I still feel like I'm just getting started myself, but looking back, I guess I'm already on my 10th pedal:!!!:
I had no idea how to read a schematic a couple of months ago, and I had probably only soldered one or two things before I started building. Like LaoWiz, I started with breadboard, perfboard, schematics, and google. I purposely avoided looking at other people's layouts unless I got really stuck on something. I didn't touch a prefab PCB until just last week. I think diving in head first like that helped me learn a lot in a short period of time, but the obvious tradeoff is how long it takes me to complete a build. I still have a LONG way to go before I feel comfortable deviating very far from a schematic, but I'm hoping I'm on the right track.
Almost all of my builds have been on perfboard. Etching my own PCBs definitely interests me, but I need to figure out where to start on that.
Tons of great info! I was hoping for laymans terms here. When you dudes say a breadboard is that basically just a bare pcb that you have to draw up everything, where as a prefab already has the lines and connections etc laid out?
You can poke wires into those little square holes in it. This allows you to build a circuit without soldering. That way, you can try build an effect and play with different resistor/capacitor values or change a bits of it easily. And when you're done experimenting, you just pull everything off of it.
In the middle of the breadboard you can see two sets of columns of five squares going across the board with a gap between them. Each of the squares in those columns is actually connected to the others. That means if you poke say, a resistor lead into one square then you can poke something else into any other square in that column and it will be connected to the resistor. If you laid a breadboard out lengthwise then everything in the same column vertically is connected, but things in the same horizontal row are not.
In a way that makes things easy. But it also makes things hard because it means schematics can't simply be laid out on a breadboard. You have to figure out which parts should share columns and which parts can't. So you need a little bit of electronics knowledge and quite a bit of trial and error just to successfully translate your first schematic onto breadboard. Of course while you're struggling with that, you'll be learning the whole time so I suppose it's worth it. It can be frustrating is all.
You should get a breadboard. Don't buy the cheap ones from ebay, because they don't work well. I like the radioshack ones, but there are lots of good ones.
You don't need kits for simple fuzz and overdrive type circuits. You'll learn more by sourcing and laying out the parts yourself. It's hard to buy the wrong parts if you source from places like smallbearelec and pedalpartsplus. Mouser is really great, but you have to pay attention to the details like voltage rating and whether it's smd or through hole. The first time I bought from Mouser, I got giagantic 400V rated polyester caps and surface mount (smd) transistors.
Laying stuff out from schematic is hard at first, but you'll learn a lot. You can use a program called DIY Layout Creator.
I guess I'll throw these up. Its an older BYOC tubescreamer. Finished it up today, but it isn't working. The bypass works, but when engaged it goes silent. I keep looking over the solder joints and they don't look tooo terrible. Ideas?
if you are going the byoc route, they sell a simple circuit tester thingy, a probe, ground and output jack. very usefull for figuring out where the signal is interrupted in a circuit. also easily made from spare stuff. looks like this-
Band=InfiniteFluxFlux on Bandcamp
"Ingenuity comes in the face of adversity, and nobody ever becomes a legend by following the rules set by society" -A.A.
Ideas?
