Alright, I just watched the videos and my interest has gone up. I'm convinced I can at least try it out. I have a brilliant set of tweezers and a Weller WESD51 soldering station with a couple different tips. Can anyone recommend a basic project for me to get my hand dirty with SMT? Low parts count would be preferable as I don't have any SMT parts on hand and would be ordering everything.
Well, Adafruit, Jameco, and Sparkfun all have at least a couple SMT kits - not really music related at all, but they would be a fine place to start, but to be honest I've always just designed my own projects, so pick anything simple you like, and go from there. I will say, getting your boards made is really helpful if you are going to be using surface mount parts, as the solder mask makes a big difference, particularly for drag soldering.
I (and judging from the color of the boards, many other people in this thread) use
OSH Park to make my boards; I use
KiCAD to design them (I like that it is truly open source, and that it is very powerful for a free program, but it does have some quirks that can take some getting used to!); and most of my libraries come from
THIS GUY, though I obviously have to design some custom parts from time to time, which is not too hard.
Gabriel