All good guesses...but all wrong. The answer is...the op amp ticks. But my signal doesn't. I'll explain.
tonepad layou--->
http://www.tonepad.com/getFile.asp?id=70I kept going back and forth between working on the circuit board and searching the form for answers. I saw one guy who said he had a bad 10uf cap in the lfo section and he fixed it. I looked at mine and saw that it was fine. Red Herring. I think it was this same guy however who said he used his audio probe to listen to the ticking. GENIUS!!! So I listened. Pins, 1,2, and 3 all on the second opamp (the lfo) ticked like the devil. But once I got up by that 10 uf it was very subtle. In fact....once that ticking went through any resistors.....it got quite. So then I looked at all the my connections around the pins one and three. If you see in the tonepad layout....there is are two traces that go under the second opamp. One is from pin 1, and it ticks loud. The other (from pin 7) has no ticking at all. Amazing! But yet I still had ticking at the output.
So I traced my ticking backwards from the output, and concluded it was getting in through the air on a connection lead wire thingy. If you look at the tonepad layout, there is a blue trace in the bottom right that goes from a 10k resistor over to the .05u output cap and then curves up and left to another 10k resitor. (kinda makes a U that is rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.) I noticed in 2 places it came in close proximity to traces that were big tickers (off of pins 1 and 3). I resoldered those connections so the lead wire just stayed further away.
I also notice I had just solder blobbed the connection where the 3 150k resistors come together. I had also read somewhere to make sure the solder connections on the LFO don't connect to the board anywhere or else they might cause ticking. I desoldered that whole region and used a lead and very little solder to connect them. I also just removed excess solder on some of the other joints in the area. Stuff that normally wouldn't matter, but I just wanted to get as little metal in the air to pick up or send ticking.
When I tried it....it worked. NO TICKING. I'm pretty sure it was a combination of both things that helped. When I used the audioprobe, I still heard the really loud ticking on pins 1,2, and 3, but now, the ticking is not interfering with output signal....so all is well in the world.
WHAT I LEARNED: Even if you spend 5 hours putting a board together....it should have been 6. I just need to be a little bit more careful about keeping my distance.
Lastly....I would like to thank everyone who looked in or offered some advice. Even though nobody gave me a 100% solution...it was the little ideas that lead me to finding out what was wrong. Thanks for all the help. And like I said in my last post. I think I learned alot more about the circuit by having it not working. THANKS!!!!
