Hobby ∞ Craft ∞ Career

andare said:
I'm still trying to procure all the components I need but it's been tough. Many are not available, I've had to buy from many different vendors and I still don't know what to do about the enclosures. I live in Europe so every purchase from outside the EU comes with enthusiastic shipping costs that are getting harder to eat as the cost of life has increased a lot here in Poland.
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I feel your pain so made this for us to share:

Building in the EU

With various taxes and parts generally coming from outside the EU, I thought it'd be useful to share our experiences.. My experience with buying from Germany is: Getting anything from the US is painful from shipping costs. PCBs are tolerable if you buy enough to average out the shipping/tax...
forum.pedalpcb.com forum.pedalpcb.com
 
Effects are a smorgasboard of flavour enhancers for regular food that I've always wanted to taste.
I highly recommend not reading the following diatribe and just skip to TLDR at the bottom of the post.

I saw some kits advertised in Guitar & Bass Magazine out of the UK way back, before there were many forums and DIY-PCB suppliers, but I didn't pull the trigger and regretted it 'cause when I was ready the kits were no longer offered.

The perfect storm of increased availability of DIY-info via forums, videos, suppliers etc and the key that unlocked it all — meeting a mentor, pushed me past the tipping point.

I don't post my builds, 'cause they're just another blank box with something inside. I want to get to TheWinterSoldier-level pro-looking pedals that could be mistaken for commercial offerings. Another reason I don't post much is extremely low output. Realistically, I couldn't do this for a living. I'm not an EE; I was not the kid who took a clock/watch apart and put it back together, I was the kid who took it apart and couldn't get it back together (probably why it took me so long to finally pull the trigger on a soldering iron and get into the hobby).

When I first started, I thought about building becoming a second income, but I was on the wave of new DIYers with the same/similar thoughts — however, after hearing from established builders about the trials and tribulations of running a pedal-business, combined with a market glut of new "boutique" builders...

I'll be happy to get to that level where I have pedals that are good enough they could be sold commercially, but my delusions of grandeur have been quelled.


I'm interested in sounds, so I'm interested in modulation and other effects that mutate the signal greatly, I'm into rare unobtainium type circuits such as the Schumann PLL or the Ludwig Synth. I'm happy to build a YATS if I can tweak the hell out of it so it's not just another YATS, but c'mon — tweaked YATS have been done to death and make me want to YAKS.


TLDR:
COOL SOUNDS MAKE ME PLAY MORE! Godot knows I need the practice.
Cool sounds inspire me to play in a way that is beyond my level of ability: "Wow! Did I just play that?"

So I continue to collect rare circuits with the aim to someday build them and hear them and for them to push me to being a better player.

Alas, I'm not really in the hobby of building pedals...
My hobby is collecting PCBs.
 
Definitely a Hobby for me, as much I would love to spend more time learning ,researching, building and playing there a lot of things in life that seem to take precedent and then fun stuff gets back burnered, but I’m sure this is the case for most of us.
 
I am loving this thread!

I got interested in building pedals in the 90s, in high school. I had nobody to help and had no idea what all those weird symbols meant. I was really into playing music (still am) so I developed that first. I did do EE in college (in Italy) but that didn't really help with pedal building - Italian universities are rarely hands on. I ended up moving to the US in 2009 and there I made a friend who introduced me to soldering and pedal building. I built a few pedals back then (from Tonepad and GPCB) and then took a long break. Two kids later, I decided to resume pedal building right before the pandemic, when I found this forum. Still a hobby for me. I do want to improve my graphics, but I don't really have aspirations to build to sell right now. I do like building and I would like to share what I know with others, which is why I am hosting a workshop here in Brooklyn this Sunday. Hopefully the first of many.
 
Mentaltossflycoon said:
This and the idea of having any sort of guarantee on my boxes makes me want to throw up. If I give it to you and you break it I don't have to fix it.
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Repairs are the worst. I don't have people breaking my pedals much anymore, the most common thing I'm seeing is someone saying something is wrong and requesting a pre-paid return label, they send it back to me, and there's nothing wrong with it, just user error.
 
So I started out building kits because it was so much cheaper than buying the real thing. I’m now in a place I could afford to buy the thing I want but much prefer the DIY route for the process and being able to tweak circuits to my preferences.

I also enjoy it from the concept of learning and my own electronic development. I started off with a couple of failed builds that then progressed to simple kits then complex builds and FV1. Now I’ve been really enjoying designing my own PCBs. Next I want to get into coding with microcontrollers. There’s always more to know.

I don’t sell any of my builds at the moment and have no real interest in having it as a business but I would like to be able to sell a few builds so the hobby becomes more self sustaining.
 
Hobby for me too. Started as I wanted to try some effects without breaking the bank or having to flip pedals for what is mostly basement playing. This was my 2020 project, so it all got amped up by the pandemic as a much needed outlet. Than got the building bug and am nearing 50 builds in the last two years. Mainly built for myself to try stuff, built a couple for friends who play guitar (for like beer money over cost), and then probably sold around 30 or so. At one point last year I realized I was ordering some stuff that I wouldn't have the use for, mainly to sell to finance more builds, and that took some fun out of it. I still have a few builds lined up, and want to continue to do a number of builds each year, but I'd rather be playing more, and try to learn more about circuits, and that's what I try to shift too.

Also, a lot of the time, I end up not making a big profit on the pedals I sell, and I'm pretty happy with that; the amount goes towards parts and supplies, and I'd rather have someone play a pedal I made than it sitting on a shelf because I would want 10$ more. Most of the conversations I had with buyers were fun, and I'm glad that a pedal would go to an enthusiast for a good price while I get some "funding" to continue this hobby.
I did only limited commission, one for a friend and one for a person that contacted me online. In this last case, I laid the terms well and asked for half the amount before ordering parts and supply. But I wouldn't do it on the regular, as the back and forth is time consuming, even in a case where everything goes well.
 
This is just the thread I needed. I was feeling guilty about having 10 PCBs in my drawer so I searched for "Obsession" in the forums to see where other people were at haha.

I'm pretty new to all of this. I only just started putting pedals together in January of this year after getting into pedals in general a year ago. So far I've built 8. This is absolutely a hobby for me at the moment. That said, I'm kind of obsessed with it, and have fallen head-first into pedal-building. I'm checking this forum on a regular basis, saving different carts on Tayda for future builds, thinking about what pedals I want to make in the future, etc. Thankfully my partner is super supportive and as long as we're able to keep the electricity on in the house doesn't seem to have an issue with me spending my extra money on parts and enclosures and whatnot.

I've had a couple friends commission me for pedals, since I started posting some of them on social media too. It was nice to make a little extra money doing something that is really fun for me and I enjoy the hell out of doing. However, I'm still really just doing this for myself and for the fun of it. If someone asks me to make a pedal for them and I know it's something I can make then it's a nice little bonus project, but otherwise I think it'll remain a hobby for me. Plus, until I get to the point of making my own circuits and whatnot, charging someone for a build based off of a PCB from here or AionFX or something makes me feel like a fraud for some reason.
 
You guys are scaring me....hahah. Well, as you know from my build posts I'm a total noob and been in this for errr.....maybe 6 weeks?
I've built 8 1/2 pedals so far. (the 1/2 counts two that are torn apart in pieces at the moment:) I'm way beyond obsessed right now and having a great time reading the forum, learning, building, experimenting.

This all started with wanting a King of Tone pedal and finding out how obtusely ridiculous it was to acquire one. Well, I fulfilled that goal by building multiple versions of the AWESOME Paragon and now I'm on a quest to replace my whole pedal collection with DIY stuff. I don't gig or play out, but spend a lot of time futzing around my home studio/DAW.

This will never be commercial for me, not even to fund itself. I have zero interest in putting myself under that kind of stress. I have a mentally demanding day job (I run a sales department selling enterprise software) and this is my escape. I'm on the ADHD scale and tend to hyper focus on things and building pedals REALLY helps me focus on a detail oriented task which then frees my mind to process other life stuff (work, marriage, kids, theology, etc). I'm also a fly fisherman and go through phases where tying flies gives me the same focus, release, obsession, heh.

My background as a DIY'r is limited to guitars and guitar electronics. I built my first Warmoth partscaster over 30 years ago (still have it) and have been building and/or modifying guitars ever since. I started doing my own setups and fretwork out of necessity, because I could never pay someone that could get it "quite right" the way I like it. So I learned how to do it and invested in some StewMac tools. I started swapping pickups and stuff because I was always chasing some "sound" in my head.

As you also may have guessed from my posts I'm a bit anal about things and can definitely go down a rabbit hole (like building the "perfect" Paragon hahah).

I honestly have no clue how many PCB's I have waiting to be built out, it's got to be well over a dozen, been on a bit of a pcb ordering spree. (Especially with Aion's sale last week!).

I just pulled all the parts together build a Paragon for my brother, (my last Paragon PCB...arghh and they're out of stock at the moment). It will be the first pedal that I'm actually giving away. I have an Angry Andy Plus that I built for my buddy but not sure if I'm going to send it to him yet. I'm not completely happy with it. I might keep it and build him another one. (drilling was a bit wonky). But aside from my buddy and my brother I have no plans to build anything for anyone else.

At some point I will have just about every overdrive and boost pedal imaginable (HAH) and would like to move onto modulation, reverb and delay pedals.
 
So I actually have two garbage PCB boxes, one is bare boards that I for whatever reason don't need. The other is for boards that had pick-and-place assembly done but that I don't need (most of these are old versions of designs) and I keep them around so I can scrounge parts as needed. I try not to think about how much money is tied up in these boxes.

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jjjimi84 said:
10? I think I am working through my box of already populated boards last count was in the 60s plus the boards that just came in the mail. Obsession is my middle name and the name of my cologne
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60+?

Lemme know when you hit high triple digits... oh, but wait, you actually build them, too.

Nevermind...


fig said:
Egad man. Reminds me of the piles of crumbled pieces of paper containing the first line of my novel.

The box of boards was dark and steamy...no...sultry like the night ahead...yeah...good stuff! :unsure:
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Snoopy-writing.jpg
It was a Darkglass and SoloDallas Stormy EQD Night Wire, a Zvex SHO rang out...​
 
This thread rules. Old school RadioShack kid here. Mowed lawns to have cash to go buy electronics as a kid. Pedal building never crossed my radar until I wanted a Benson Preamp pedal but didn’t want to pay up the $$$. I’m one of the newbs that discovered pedal building in 2020. 50+ builds later I’m hooked. Built up a perfect board, for my tastes, and it inspired me to record again. Took a few months off building, but just placed an order for 5 new boards. Excited to smell the iron hot again very soon.
Hobby for me as well. I’ve sold a few pedals but prefer not to deal with hassle. If a friend needs something built I will do it but I just enjoy the process of ordering the parts, assembling the thing and then the moment of truth when I plug it in for the first time. That’s why I build.
 
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