After many years of tweaking and building what are your inherent truths?

[sajy_ho]

Here's mine:
You can't get your favorite tone unless you have the same guitar!

[Philippe]

*in terms of guitar fxs & pedalboard layout...less is more, unless one is merely striving to impress a naive & impressionable audience* excessive bling can be applied to just about anything these days & it's getting so tacky!

[Bill Mountain]

- The absolute BEST thing you can do to prevent problems with a build is to verify component values and placement AS YOU SELECT THEM and JUST PRIOR TO INSTALLING!

To adapt the carpenter's maxim: "identify and confirm twice, install once".

- I have been doing this for over a decade and I still cannot follow most of what RG Keen and Mark Hammer post on here.    

Neither can I. 

Going off of this thread...
When starting out you are referred to many articles or posts by RG or Mark Hammer as some of the experts of our hobby
One of the inherent truths I've found is that if you ask a question regarding some of their material you will almost always get an answer directly from one of them.

Good point.  If RG, Mark, or PRR respond you know it's a good thread.

[tubegeek]

When starting out you are referred to many articles or posts by RG or Mark Hammer as some of the experts of our hobby
One of the inherent truths I've found is that if you ask a question regarding some of their material you will almost always get an answer directly from one of them.

I always thought they were both just Googling themselves constantly?

[mac]

My truth is,

Now that I'm near 50, after some minutes playing, I bypass ALL my pedals, pour two fingers of good old Scotch into a cold glass, and enjoy the sound of a single or quad set of hot EL84.

mac

[Thecomedian]

The likelihood that your new idea has already been done by someone else is inversely proportional to the number of circuits you've built, and yet always exceedingly high.

My inherent truth:

I can spend hour upon hour "inventing" a way to do something, from first principles. I will review the math, the theory, go on goose-chases to recall how to calculate this and that...and voila!!  I find a different way to clip, or to make an octave, etc, all on my own!

Then I'll look at some fairly common circuits, and if I clean up what I've 'created', I find that I'm doing exactly the same thing...but THEIR stuff is neater, has all the right tweaks to account for various impedances and losses here and there - the deep stuff that finishes a design off.

There's a saying in biology, "Darwin already thought of that".  I'd like one for this hobby, "Ohm already thought of that", he he!!  Or maybe MXR...

But - the chase is so enlightening and educational (ack, dirty word!), it's worth every minute.  One day, each of us will design some part of a cold fusion reactor, and change the world, after all!    

This I think is the best truth. I've been working towards some kind of understanding relating to this by reducing everything to a gain block (same triangle as an opamp, but only one input if its discrete transistor or tube), calculate input and output impedances, disregard bias resistors and caps in the gain block, but outside that gain block, say in the feedback area, put those diodes and caps and resistors on the schematic between output and input.

Its just a personal interest in seeing all the major companies pedals how they relate to each other.

[kaycee]

For me,

No matter how sure you are that you have built it as per the layout/schematic/build doc, if it doesn't work, you've done something wrong and you've just got to stare at it long enough to see what (or start over, or make something else).

Test it before you wire up the switching, then again before you box it.

You can beat a good Fuzz Face

[Digital Larry]

I don't recall the last time I actually soldered more than a couple of things together.  Having done a ton of soldering and hardware debugging in the early part of my career, I actually don't like it at all.   I built a fair number of kits in my pre and teen years without knowing a single thing about electronics.  When I built kits, after awhile I stopped following instructions and would insert all the resistors first and solder those as it was more convenient.  Finally I spent a fair amount of money and time building an amp that fried the moment I turned it on.  I vowed to get an education so I could avoid that in the future.  So I did.  

My takeaway would be to build and test things section by section so that if and when it doesn't work end to end, you still have confidence that it worked up until you added that last stage and so you can likely focus just on the most recent thing you did.  Debugging hardware is really tough because nobody wants to take it all apart or unsolder the components to isolate the sections, so you wind up doing all sorts of crazy things to avoid that.

Others:

Don't be afraid to learn some basics like Ohm's law and how to figure the gain in some basic BJT stages.
Understand that things like capacitors and inductors have impedance "sorta" like resistors, but frequency dependent.
Buy and learn to use a voltmeter.
If you want to get serious, purchase and learn to use an oscilloscope (or addon for your PC).  Much of what I see people struggling with here I would never try to debug without a scope.

[duck_arse]

Every new circuit or circuit board, I automatically want regardless of how many other boards I have waiting to be populated even if the new one covers very similar territory to something else that is already on the "list"

inherent truth: the corner of your bench reserved for "in progress, missing a part, allocated to a build, unfinished, to be wired, soon" will be past the middle of the bench if you don't make a start on them, and keep finding interesting things. "oohhh, a cordwood superfuzz, why the hell not?!"

My truth is,
Now that I'm near 50, after some minutes playing, I bypass ALL my pedals, pour two fingers of good old Scotch into a cold glass, and enjoy the sound of a single or quad set of hot EL84.
mac

now that I'm past 50, and have metres and metres of printer cables to cut and use, no matter how many times I look under the magy and light, I will still confuse the blk/wht, gry/blk, pink/blk, wht/blk, orng/wh, grey and pink wires I cut to length last night.

[vigilante397]

Good point.  If RG, Mark, or PRR respond you know it's a good thread.

Very true. If I see someone has asked a question I know something about but RG, Mark, or PRR have posted in the thread I usually just leave it alone and write it off as "problem solved."

[Luke51411]

Good point.  If RG, Mark, or PRR respond you know it's a good thread.

Very true. If I see someone has asked a question I know something about but RG, Mark, or PRR have posted in the thread I usually just leave it alone and write it off as "problem solved."

As Mark stated earlier in this thread, "Problem Solved" Also often leads to "10 more questions" and thus begins the pursuit of knowledge...

[Frank_NH]

My truth is,

Now that I'm near 50, after some minutes playing, I bypass ALL my pedals, pour two fingers of good old Scotch into a cold glass, and enjoy the sound of a single or quad set of hot EL84.

mac

Yes, that's all well and good, but our mission here is to develop an authentic jfet-based pedal simulation of your single or quad set of hot EL84s...  

[Steben]

I'ld like to add this:

(mostly feedback) Tube amps often clip less soft than some pedal tweakers are searching for. They clip" gracefully" (not an infinite sharp corner point), but there is no such thing as a very very soft knee transfer curve on most decent and famous sounding amps.
To soft clipping will sound flabby and clean to break up will have an unnatural character. That's why many don't like germanium in TS-style clippers. And why A LED driven TS style sounds very amp like. After many years now I found out that fitting many diodes in one circuit doesn't add that much more than a real tube amp will offer. And that's why mu-amp circuits sound so good: they are not too soft, soft enough.

[Luke51411]

There will always be that one last piece that will make your pedalboard complete.

[amptramp]

It pays to be organized.  I've got lots of organization.  I just can't remember where I left it.

[Thecomedian]

Maybe its a more general truth cause there's lots of anecdotal evidence to suggest that learning works this way, but:

Learning/development of skill happens in bursts. One day you realize something because all the hours you put into whatever it is comes together into an "aha" moment, and then you have a new foundation of knowledge and understanding to base building circuits off of. It also pays to be consistent in learning one specific thing.

[highwater]

I've not been at it very long, but here's mine: You can screw-up quite badly and still have something that seems to mostly work. For instance, just because the amp isn't buzzing like a kazoo doesn't mean your signal grounds are connected to the circuit itself.

And +1 to debugging empty sockets... I fell victim to that on my third-ever *cough*firstwithanopamp*cough* build. Forgot a jumper, took the IC out while I soldered the jumper, spent two hours debugging previously-correct voltages.

[mac]

now that I'm past 50, and have metres and metres of printer cables to cut and use, no matter how many times I look under the magy and light, I will still confuse the blk/wht, gry/blk, pink/blk, wht/blk, orng/wh, grey and pink wires I cut to length last night.

"Is this metal film resistor a 2k2 or 22k or 3k3 or 33k or...?"
"%&@#&!!!"
"Where's the DMM?"   

Yes, that's all well and good, but our mission here is to develop an authentic jfet-based pedal simulation of your single or quad set of hot EL84s...  Grin

50 years waiting!!!
By the time something like this happens I'll have arthritis in my fingers and I'll no longer care     

mac

[Frank_NH]

50 years waiting!!!
By the time something like this happens I'll have arthritis in my fingers and I'll no longer care  Grin   Grin

mac
   

Actually, by then we'll all be hard of hearing, and then EVERY jfet gain stage design will sound like a tube!  

("Look Honey...I finally did it!  The ultimate jfet amp simulation!  Yee ha!  Ehh??  What did you say???)

[amptramp]

Treat craftsmanship as a technology to be learned, just like FET biasing or Bode plot drawing.  Much of craftsmanship is patience, but you will need lass patience if you have the correct array of tools to work with and you think about things that are not immediately obvious.  Which pair of pliers do you use to wrap a wire around a pot lead?  Straight or bent-nose needlenose?  Think about what you need to do the job properly.