ilovefuzz.com

Hellos—

So I know there's obviously a ton of stuff for me to dig through here, which I plan on doing, but I figured I'd also ask for a couple of quick suggestions to get me started with what I'm seeking.

I've built the BYOC Confidence Booster and the Yellow OD. I thought making the OD was pretty interesting, but I'm not typically one who gets too excited about just following instructions / recipes / etc line for line. Because of that, I pretty much made the one pedal and didn't keep up the habit.

That said, I read an article in PG with Ruban Nielson from Unknown Mortal Orchestra, who spoke of his interests in modding circuits, breadboarding, etc, and it re-piqued my interest. This is much more my kind of thing... learning what different resistor/cap/pot values will do, building circuits on perf/vero, maybe even one day making something of my own design. That sounds f'n great.

I'm familiar with Tonefiend and Joe Gore's stuff, plus I found out about Craig Anderton's Electronics Projects for Musicians (which I plan to buy), and found PDFs of Brian Wampler's now out of print books.

These should probably be plenty to get me started, but are there any other big suggestions for the DIY noob? I'd love to learn more about electronics, but my artsy fartsy brain is going to need something that's a little more accessible than pure engineer-speak. So yep, stuff that's tailored to musicians and such would be great.

Thanks in advance!

I had a ton of fun and learned a lot building and rebuilding my USA Big Muff, tons of mods on the web and lots of room inside to work. You can hear what different cap resistor and diode values sound like in various points of the circuit.

Ooh I have one of those! Excellent idea—I feel vindicated for always defending those awesomely huge cases.

the breadboard is good for some things but I think a lot of breadboard work can be done on PCB or veroboard instead. when you are swapping resistors in a fuzz face to bias q2 then you realize that you can just throw a 10k pot in there and build it on a pcb or vero or tag board or a cereal box paper circuits. you can instantly dial in any sound you want continuously and measure the pot to get the resistor value for the finished pedal.

Don't waist a lot of money on parts. Almost everything you need is in that old radio, or stereo receiver, or VCR that you don't use anymore.

SoaringTortoise wrote:Don't waist a lot of money on parts. Almost everything you need is in that old radio, or stereo receiver, or VCR that you don't use anymore.

you have to try pretty hard to find a radio that is not surface mount in 2015. most of this stuff went to surface mount in 1985 or 1990 ish. all the components will have very short leads. I am not against free guitar pedals or dumpster diving. if you are broke then do it. if you have $5 in your pocket then stop foooking around and just buy what you need. time is money. I just cleaned out all my junk. time wasted for $10. I only keep really big polymer caps from microwaves now and feet from everything else. these caps are $13 each in small quantity on mouser. I use them for LFO in modular synthesizers.

Malvino's semiconductor approximations and electronic principles are great texts that will have you well on your way to making your own circuits. They are also super cheap on amazon.

Edit: he really breaks it down from the basics, and re-goes-over stuff you probably learned in highschool about valence electrons and such. It really isn't too engineer-y but it does require some active cognition. Just throwing it out there because those two books really changed my life. It took me a year to actually read them, but I'm better off b/c of it