bengarland
Active member
It's my PedalPCB-iversary -- one year since I started down this wild and wonderful road of building guitar pedals.
To help me celebrate, tell me:
1) What's your favorite PedalPCB?
2) What's one pedal-building tip or trick that you've learned that you think other builders should know?
I'll start...
Favorite pedal is the Duo Phase but I also really like the Stockade. Going further down the list it's hard to pick a definitive order in my Top 10... it depends on my mood so I'll just list 'em alphabetically: Arcana, Dark Rift, Magnetron, Muffin Factory, Paragon, Parenthesis, War Scythe, Zapper. At the bottom of the list though are definitely the Backfeeder -- kinda gimmicky, Procrastinator -- very narrow range of where it sounds good/interesting, and the Captain Bit, Roboto, and Super Heterodyne -- I thought the low fi sound would more interesting in real life compared to the YouTube demos but these 3 are just so unpredictable and "bad weird" instead of "good weird" IMHO.
The tip or trick I can share is:
We're all cleaning our boards after soldering, right? I started out using the standard laboratory style pump-top bottle, you know the type where there's a little reservoir on top and you bang your brush on it to make it squirt out more alcohol? That ended up being too fiddly for me. I replaced it with a clear plastic foodservice squirt bottle with a pointy tip, the kind like you would see for ketchup and mustard at a hot dog stand. With the tip cut to a very narrow opening, I can easily squeeze the IPA all over the board and then scrub it with a brush. It seems like a simple change but this has allowed me to get the boards a lot cleaner in half the time. Gotta use a lot of it otherwise you're just smearing diluted flux all over the board. I use one of those photo lens cleaner air squeezer bulbs to blast the IPA out from under the resistors etc, then wipe it off with kimwipes. Works like a charm.
As far as what I've learned? Overall I'd say that it's easier than I imagined. Building pedals still takes lots of time and concentration and attention to detail, but I've been surprised at how there's not a lot that can go wrong. Every time I've had an issue it's turned out to be something simple: an electrolytic cap installed backwards, a jack tip accidentally touching the enclosure, a bad 3PDT (don't buy them from Tayda), an IC installed backwards -- but nothing catastrophic. I've never totally fried anything. And truthfully, the mistakes have just helped me understand what's going on instead of just blindly looking at it as a "paint by numbers".
Lastly I will say that I really appreciate all of the hard work that Robert puts into designing these boards. A few months ago I ventured into building a few pedals from other sources, and they weren't nearly as easy and honestly I wasn't satisfied with the end product (I won't name names). I had mistakenly assumed early on that "all DIY pedals must be like this" but they're not. I appreciate how consistent the PedalPCB designs are. Very few surprises.
Thanks everyone. I'm looking forward to seeing which pedals are the faves around here!
To help me celebrate, tell me:
1) What's your favorite PedalPCB?
2) What's one pedal-building tip or trick that you've learned that you think other builders should know?
I'll start...
Favorite pedal is the Duo Phase but I also really like the Stockade. Going further down the list it's hard to pick a definitive order in my Top 10... it depends on my mood so I'll just list 'em alphabetically: Arcana, Dark Rift, Magnetron, Muffin Factory, Paragon, Parenthesis, War Scythe, Zapper. At the bottom of the list though are definitely the Backfeeder -- kinda gimmicky, Procrastinator -- very narrow range of where it sounds good/interesting, and the Captain Bit, Roboto, and Super Heterodyne -- I thought the low fi sound would more interesting in real life compared to the YouTube demos but these 3 are just so unpredictable and "bad weird" instead of "good weird" IMHO.
The tip or trick I can share is:
We're all cleaning our boards after soldering, right? I started out using the standard laboratory style pump-top bottle, you know the type where there's a little reservoir on top and you bang your brush on it to make it squirt out more alcohol? That ended up being too fiddly for me. I replaced it with a clear plastic foodservice squirt bottle with a pointy tip, the kind like you would see for ketchup and mustard at a hot dog stand. With the tip cut to a very narrow opening, I can easily squeeze the IPA all over the board and then scrub it with a brush. It seems like a simple change but this has allowed me to get the boards a lot cleaner in half the time. Gotta use a lot of it otherwise you're just smearing diluted flux all over the board. I use one of those photo lens cleaner air squeezer bulbs to blast the IPA out from under the resistors etc, then wipe it off with kimwipes. Works like a charm.
As far as what I've learned? Overall I'd say that it's easier than I imagined. Building pedals still takes lots of time and concentration and attention to detail, but I've been surprised at how there's not a lot that can go wrong. Every time I've had an issue it's turned out to be something simple: an electrolytic cap installed backwards, a jack tip accidentally touching the enclosure, a bad 3PDT (don't buy them from Tayda), an IC installed backwards -- but nothing catastrophic. I've never totally fried anything. And truthfully, the mistakes have just helped me understand what's going on instead of just blindly looking at it as a "paint by numbers".
Lastly I will say that I really appreciate all of the hard work that Robert puts into designing these boards. A few months ago I ventured into building a few pedals from other sources, and they weren't nearly as easy and honestly I wasn't satisfied with the end product (I won't name names). I had mistakenly assumed early on that "all DIY pedals must be like this" but they're not. I appreciate how consistent the PedalPCB designs are. Very few surprises.
Thanks everyone. I'm looking forward to seeing which pedals are the faves around here!
