A thank you and an aside.

[zgrav]

I wanted to post a thanks to Nathan for the time he puts into making some of his projects available as DYI. Clearly it is not the profit center for his very successful tube-pedal niche, and when you look at the attention given to making clear build docs with links for the parts it shows his attention to detail and effort to support folks who want to give DIY a try.

And for the comment to go with the thanks, I wanted to suggest that offering a tube pedal based on the Dumble schematics could be very well received. The sparkle from four gain stages combined with the slightly different B/M/T tone stack could be sweet.

 

[vigilante398]

Well shucks, thanks man I got my start doing pedals by scouring forums and reading posts from people much smarter than me, and I've always been grateful for the information shared in the DIY community and for all the amazing projects people put out there, so I like being able to make some more options available that are otherwise difficult to get into.

A Dumble preamp certainly would be a cool project. As you mentioned DIY PCBs aren't my main thing and I don't plan for them to be, so I don't want to get carried away with offering a ton of projects, but I'll give it some thought.

Something else that just popped into my head; as soon as you start doing tube preamps it's easy to say "well what about doing ____" and come up with a LONG list of potentially cool projects. But once you really get the hang of it, you notice that the building blocks of one preamp aren't too different from any other, and once you have power sorted out and a reliable way to mount the tube in the box, it's not hard to do a hundred different preamps, which is how the list of pedals that I offer for sale commercially has grown so much.

So here's what I was thinking:

It would be kind of cool to do a tube preamp development board kind of thing. Like a PCB sized for a certain enclosure with the mounts for tube daughterboards and a few spots for pots to be mounted, and an SMPS somewhere on there to get power, then the rest of the PCB could just be like perfboard. Power is taken care of, tubes are taken care of, pots are taken care of, then you fill in the rest with whatever circuit you want. It's a happy medium between a ready-made project and creating whatever you want. It certainly wouldn't be for everyone, but for intermediate-advanced builders who can read schematics and source components it would be an easy/convenient way to prototype tube circuits or do one-off builds, either following one of the MANY schematics already online or creating a completely new design.

Anyway, I start rambling and I keep going Just an idea that popped into my head and spun around for a bit.

 

[Silver Blues]

Definitely agree, thanks from me as well. You're a unique gem that I'm glad exists in the DIY space.