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

[Luke51411]

Sometimes things come together beautifully without any planning whatsoever and other times no matter how much planning is done you come across bumps in the road at every step.

Installing a circuit in a box 1 size bigger than it's designed for is quite enjoyable. Completing a build installed in a box one size smaller than it should fit in is less enjoyable but more rewarding when completed.

[StephenGiles]

At the end of the day most of my builds have worked, but if they have not, it's not yet the end!

[bool]

"Easy does it - and if not, use some force ... "

[Digital Larry]

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

About ten years ago, I realized my eyes were starting to fail when I couldn't tell by looking whether or not the tiny SMT components on a new board we got back at work were there.  I had to resort to the Braille method.

[Morocotopo]

- R.G. is right, I´m wrong. By the way, is R.G. Mother Nature himself?
- Buy good tools! Not fun trying to pry out an IC with an used toothpick.
- Take good care of your eyes. use GREAT lighting in your bench, enough to blind a medium sized hippo.
- Take good care of your ears. 100 Watt amps are the creation of the devil. Or the CIA.
- Learn new things every day, till the last day of your life.
- Make a pedal and then give it away to someone who deserves it. It´s the BEST feeling. Don´t be a hoarder. How many pedals you need?

[LightSoundGeometry]

I always want to get really fancy with my builds and I look for all sorts of unique ways to clip or EQ a signal but I'm always brought back to reality when I plug in a simple pedal and it sounds great.

So my inherent truth is simple.  A high pass filter before clipping and a functional EQ post clipping will almost always produce a decent sounding pedal.  The clipping element almost doesn't matter if the EQ is powerful enough.

Example:  I built a super crazy fuzz with Ge diodes, CMOS inverters, and vintage opamps which has a ton of low end created by putting the diodes in a low pass circuit which only clipped the highs.  I put in months of thought into the circuit and tweaked it endlessly to get where it is and I still have a bunch of tweaks to try.  I tried to make the design simple and elegant.  I approached it from an artistic standpoint more than a functional one.  I thought I was onto something (I still do) and I was comparing it to a simple LM386 overdrive pedal at practice the other day.  The 386 overdrive had an extreme high pass on the front (around 700Hz) and I just bumped up the bass on the amp (played clean) and it was amazing and it didn't require months of R&D.  I'll just build one of the many 386 based overdrives with a HPF on the front and an EQ on the back.  Instead of building based on unique ideas I should really be concentrating on using basic circuits to accomplish needed tasks.

What about you.  When you venture down the rabbit hole what are you always reminded of after the fact?

I'm sold! I will buy one and try it out !

love your passion !

[PRR]

"what are your inherent truths?"

[LightSoundGeometry]

the amount of sagacious wisdom in this thread is unreal 

I actually broke out the pen and paper to take notes. jb weld, carpenters oath, everyone goes through mistakes

how cool I am for sunbaking my enclosures for a more organic tone  lolol

[LightSoundGeometry]

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

The best guitar players I know dont use pedals or any type of effects hardly at all. One guy bob, the human jukebox, knows every song , ever.. plays a stock les paul into a an old fender tweed 4x12, no effects at all. can play and replicate just about any song out there somehow lol ;  and my one good friend travis timmons, who is the best amateur guitarist I have ever seen in 40+ years, plays a stock MIM strat into a solid state peavey amp and only uses a wah wah.   I woudl put him in a head cutting contest against anyone, and that include many, many professional touring bands ive seen over the years. Sometimes pure talent overcomes equipment.

A lot of times my amp and guitar sound so good there is no need for any effect, but I like to go clean and dirty and use a pedal because my amp is a pure one channel tube amp. I never used pedals in the past until he last few years as I always thought it was so cool to go into a bar and crank out rock n roll with nothing..gusy would come up and stare at your rig etc ..always felt cool doing that lol.

turns out, the older I get, the more I like to color my tone..I love some reverb or slight delay now, fell in love with fuzz, the octavia and leslie cab. I love my wah wah for reggae type stuff .

My Buddy travis playing the bass for me - in this gig, i was using a MIA Tele with Seymour Duncan lipsticks going through a classic peavey 30 , no pedals at all.




This is Travis on his MIM black strat, only a wah wah pedal, and I am playing the bass.



I dont have pics of bobs LP ..it was an older one from teh 70's ..he moved a few years back, last I heard his man cave caught on fire and he lost all of his guitars and amps

[italianguy63]

 

My inherent truth?

Paul (PRR) remains a fountain of knowledge.

MC

[Nick C.]

My corollary to, "When it comes to distortion, after the first 50 they pretty much all sound the same."

- I will tweak every over drive so it sounds just like my original Tube Screamer, without realizing it.

Also,

- I will tweak a circuit on the breadboard for weeks, run LTspice with hundreds of scenarios, and when I box it up it will sound wrong and need more tweaking.

[~arph]

My inherent truth?

Paul (PRR) remains a fountain of knowledge.

MC

Yes, so what do you do for a living Paul. Plus I don't recall having seen any of your builds on the pictures thread...

[bloxstompboxes]

My inherent truth?

Paul (PRR) remains a fountain of knowledge.

MC

Yes, so what do you do for a living Paul. Plus I don't recall having seen any of your builds on the pictures thread...

He lives off of feeding us his knowledge. lol. Monetarily, I have no idea.

[ulysses]

-buy a guitar you love
-build an amp you love
-use pedals to exploit them both

when musicians are starting out they often try and make a shit guitar sound good through a shit amp by using pedals - we've all been there

-simple old valve amps really do sound better - as soon as amp companies try to add in a bunch of shit to them they just make them worse imo. make an original from mojotone or various diy places.

-speakers make a big difference. get ones that suit the amp.

-when making dirt boxes, the most important block is the distortion block - a bad distortion block shouldn't be seen to be *fixed* with an eq block - it should be shaped by it.

-for my ears the best sounding dirt pedals get their great sound from a well exploited distortion block - figure out which part is being exploited, and how.

-there are a lot of ordinary tone blocks out there - if you must use one, find one with a character that suits the distortion block's sound - if you dont want a character tone block, look at something like pete cornish's g2 - he pulled the muff tone block out and replaced it with two components! no more mid scoop! totally opened the circuit up.

-opamps almost always sound worse than transistors in distortion blocks - there are some exceptions but they take some creative work to sound nice ie, tubescreamer

-eq'ing within the feedback loop of distortion block often yields nice results

-germanium transistors are best for low dirt
-silicon transistors are best for high gain
-germainium diodes have a more natural feel than silicon diodes
-the make of the diodes can make a tonal difference - ive used NOS 1588's that sound much nicer than more recent 1588's etc.

-learn to handpick transistors. make rg's tranistor tester to check the gain of transistors - even for silicon! i often see the same name transistors have different gains. if you think a circuit should have more or less gain, swap the transistors out for a different one! we do it in tube amps all the time, tube swapping, people should do it with transistors more often. experiment with them - create something new!

-the only buffer i like is pete cornish's buffer - ive tried a lot and this is the only one i have been happy with
-dont be afraid to cut off buffers at the front and end of circuits

-when breadboarding, make some rules and stick to them - ie, orientation of parts, location of leads off the board

-different brands of strings sound vastly different. i like dr blues and elixirs - im always breaking the d string of dr blues though - too much bending

these are personal opinions

[ulysses]

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

this is so true.

i would also add, if you want to write in the style of another guitarist, buy the guitar he/she uses. riffs "come out" of a guitar. i'll pick up a M20 and nick drake riffs will come out- i play a 1972 es325 and KOL riffs come straight out of it - beatles riffs come straight out of a casino etc etc.

don't muck about, save up and buy it.

cheers

[vigilante397]

don't muck about, save up and buy it.

There's a lot of truth to that as well. I owned a fake Les Paul for many years before I finally talked myself into a real Gibson, and it is worth every bit.