Soldering can be excellent for helping to focus. It's like meditating for me when I get into it.
Start with a small and easy board and just go for it. The Mercurial Boost (everyone needs a Mercurial Boost) would be a good one.
Worst case you screw it up and as long as you learn something from...
I've only got experience with the NPN version, but you shouldn't be getting high pitched noise or crackling with a DT. Might want to check and see that all of your transistor legs are connected properly since they're not soldered. Maybe try rechecking and reflowing every component. There aren't...
@Harry Klippton turned me onto the Gyraff projects, when then led me to the Hairball 1176.
I think that the most difficult thing about the Gyraff project would be building the rack and faceplate. Offboard wiring would also be quite a chore, especially compared to the way that Hairball does it...
Yeah, I dig this, and two knobs is a great idea. Maybe I'll hit up @bean to do one knob revision one of these days. If I had any skills I'd do it myself, but I can hardly get any build time in these days, learning Eagle certainly isn't in the cards.
Holy smokes, this is hot! What a build, man - way to show the kids how it's done.
As I've mainly been sharing my feelings in gif-form recently, these two explain my simultaneous emotions: