Are you building or are you playing?

In recent months, are you a builder or a player?

  • I'm a tone chaser, so I can't stop building!

    Votes: 21 53.8%

  • I got what I need for now, so it's time to just play!

    Votes: 18 46.2%
  • Total voters
    39
BuddytheReow

BuddytheReow

Moderator
I just want to take a pulse on the group right now. Your preference will probably change in time.

When I first got into this hobby, I thought it was super cool to build something that changed my tone that an amp couldn't really do. In my build journey I am approaching the point where I realized I've spent so much of my time building and prototyping that I lost a lot of my chops. I told myself about 6 months ago that I needed to bring out a metronome and actually practice!

I also pulled the trigger on a new high gain amp that takes pedals pretty well on both channels, so I'm not sure how many more dirt pedals I need. I still really enjoy the build process, but my output has been very slow recently from my bench. Maybe I'll sell some of my builds and make them over again since my building technique has gotten much better since I started? Who knows.

What phase are you guys at? Let me know in the poll or below.
 
I'm mostly done with overdrive/fuzz for now (after building maybe 20 such pedals). I have a small backlog, and there's 3-4 more PCBs I want to buy, and there's a few I want to build with vero, but I've gone through most of the big-name pedals and circuits at this point.

I do have more interest in modulation and some of the more unusual effects, maybe there's 20 pedals in that scope which I'd like to build at some point but I'm ok taking that slow as well.

I'm looking to focus more of my attention on playing, artwork, KiCad to make my own pcbs, and programming DSP effects over the next few months - rather than soldering/breadboarding.
 
I'd say I'm in both camps - I have a pedalboard that I use for church that I'm 80% happy with so it stays the same for long stretches of time. I'm I'm mostly focused on building (for myself) different kinds of modulation but I do have a to-build backlog of dirt pedals so I can try out different overdriving methods. I'm also still seeking that unicorn low-gain, no-fizz, DI-friendly bass drive pedal.
 
I originally intended to build 1 pedal I wanted that was hard-to-find. I enjoyed the process quite a bit. After that, I thought it would be cool to replace my pedalboard with my own builds. I have one pedal left to replace (micro POG), and now it looks like I can make it a reality with the recent octave shifting work shared in the daisyseed subforum.

I've tried a lot, learned a lot. After all the tone chasing... Big surprise, I kind of already knew what I liked. I did find a number of pedals where I thought "that's cool", but it doesn't make it on my board. I like having a "library" of pedals now, it's good fun to pull them off the shelf to revisit, sometimes my opinion changes on them over time.

So now I made the choice to utilize my investment and work through my backlog, which is about 40 boards. Several that I'm excited about. On the less exciting ones, I've been enjoying imagining weird combos or funky mods.

I play with a trio where I write most of the music, and it's not easy to play. Since I don't want to show up to rehearsal unprepared like a real shithead, the band keeps me in check to not let the ol' chops slip.
 
Idk, somewhere in the middle. I do play a LOT. But also I just really like trying new stuff out and changing around my board and basically have an inability to just sit still and stay pat on a particular rig. It's not even so much tone-chasing or whatnot (Honestly, I could be content tone-wise with just about any iteration of my board in recent memory) but just that I quickly get bored and want to shuffle things around. I'll spend months acquiring all the right pieces and I'll build a custom pedalboard to fit my idea and then get it all laid out and wired just right and it'll be super cool. Then a month later I'll get this urge to tear it all up and start over. Wash, rinse, repeat for the last 10 years or so.

At this point though I'm kinda thinking probably the best course of action is to just start a secondary board, lol. I've got one that I'm fairly content with that sounds great and meets all my needs - might as well start a new one with my "just for fun" pedals
 
can't really vote for one over the other.
free time is a constant battle between playing and building.
but if i'm honest, this year i've been burning through builds and making demos, but i haven't really written anything new for the band since last year.
so then i told myself alright no more builds until ive done at least x1 new song.

well that didn't last long.

and i still gotta finish that song.
 
I've mostly been breadboarding lately. Not a whole lot of playing beyond what it takes to fiddle with ideas I had to try out. It's been months since I've built an actual pedal. I have a few PCBs half done that need finished and boxed up, but I'm low on parts. I've also been fiddling with Affinity Designer trying to figure out how to make a UV print at Tayda. I sent a design in last week to get UV printed on an enclosure and it's supposed to be here tomorrow I think. Got my fingers crossed that it turned out ok.
 
I was building like crazy, until July, when life got too busy.
Now I have a a few gigs coming up, so I have to practice. And I’m happy with that.

And of course I have a dozen un-boxed, un-finished boards that are getting dusty. But winter is coming… that’s when the soldering iron heats up.
 
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