What to do now?

L

l1ghthouse

New member
I'm just starting to get into building guitar pedals and I'm feeling a little aimless right now. I've been reading through the "Advanced DIY effects pedals circuits" book from IndyGuitarist but I feel like I am not absorbing it very well and I don't really understand how this stuff actually works. To be clear I don't really need an overview into any of the components and what they do to current or voltage I understand that stuff just fine. I am more concerned with how to integrate these components into a pedal well or how some parts should be designed to sound the best. If anyoned has any suggestions or pointers in the right direction I am all ears. Anything would be helpful, thank you.
 
My encouragement would be to start with pedal kits that have been built by lots of people and then read the posts on how others have changed it with various mods and how this impacts the ‘sound’. A simple starting point is how builders change cap values to make a pedal work better with a bass or visa versa.
 
I'd say read the electro-smash tube screamer article. Then read it a few more times. Study the pedalpcb Stockade circuit, and see how those features line up with the electrosmash article. Build or breadboard a tubescreamer and mess with some of the component values.

The Tube Screamer isn't my favorite OD, but it does sound good, and there's so much info on it that it's a great learning platform.
 
+1 to breadboard a few simple circuits. Start with a 1 transistor one like the speaker cranker, then some simple IC ones like the mxr distortion+ and lightspeed.
 
IMO electronics is best understood as functional circuit blocks then transition to the component level.

You should be looking at sallen key filters and non-inverting gain stages...then build out.

You should see circuits as a signal chain, this fet is configured as a common source amplifier that clips the signal which is then low passed by a sallen key filter etc.

Electrosmash is a great starting point as is geofx.

Some other good ones are all about circuits, electronics tutorials online and elliot sound products.
 
Electrosmash has breakdowns of the big pedals: rat, tubes creamer, ds1, muff. Those are all good.

I would not look into chorus, flange, delay or verb first, those are harder imo
 
The way I approach things like this is work out what I want to achieve. Do I want to understand electronics? If so, to what end? Do I just want to design/build pedals which suit me?

For me understanding electronics is secondary to making pedals which get me where I want to go. I have read a fair bit on the subject and have come to the conclusion that a lot of it is not going to stick in my mind! I have a fair idea of what my head is good at and what it's not.

My plan has been to find circuits which have something I like about them and then modify them to do something better for me. Sometimes it's surprising how modifying a "crap" pedal can lead you in a good direction. My understanding of how things work is limited but with help I have been able to come up with some pedals which suit me better than anything I can buy.

So I guess my approach is to identify what I want then work out how to get there. Or find a pedal I like and work out how to make it suit me better. Often just adding a bass pot has improved an overdrive for me immensely. So that was one of the first things I tried to work out, and with help from here I learnt how to do that in various types of pedals. Just adding a bass pot to a TS-9 and adding a couple of diodes in the clipping section can make a TS-9 sound way more open and usable. I was amazed at how much more I liked a Tubescreamer modified like this.
 
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