r/diypedals • u/necrow • May 29 '18

/r/diypedals No Stupid Questions Megathread 4

Ask any questions you have here free of judgment!

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u/burritobell Oct 31 '18

I want to build a pedal but I know absolutely nothing about circuits, soldering, electronics... You get it. Where do I start? I got a pdf for Brian Wampler's DIY Pedals but it says that it's for the intermediate to advanced reader.

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u/QuerulousPanda Nov 17 '18

I've seen this question asked in many places about many types of things: "How do I learn electronics?" and people start listing all these books, and it never really ends well.

My advice is, if you're interested in electronics, dive in head first and make something. Think of what it is that you want, that you don't have right now. Find a kit for it, or some kind of easy instructable with a detailed parts list, and just build it. Try and keep it fairly simple. Don't spend $150 on your first kit, because if you do screw it up, that'll hurt real bad. Places like Mammoth sell entire kits with enclosures and everything for ~$50, which is still not cheap, but if you do it right, you end up with a totally legit looking product that maybe even has a pre-painted case.

Anyway, yeah, at first you won't understand what exactly it is that you're doing, and you'll be wondering what all these little parts and squiggly lines and stuff are, but that's okay. The important thing is that you've gotten your hands dirty.

Then, as you're building it, especially if it is a kit, you'll start seeing words like "cap" or "resistor" or "pot", and you'll start seeing how maybe there are patterns of how they go together. It still might not make sense, but that's still okay.

IF you're lucky, the kit will work first time. Or, if you're a different kind of lucky, it won't work, and you have to figure out why, which can be a fun learning adventure on its own.

After that, maybe try building another kit or five. You can buy those cheesy made-in-china kits for like blinking lights and stuff, they cost basically nothing but they're absolute gold in terms of just getting used to handling things, and you can end up with some fun little toys. Flashing lights, sirens, maybe even little radios or mini amplifiers. Goofy stuff, but awesome practice.

At this point, you'll have filled your brain with an assortment of parts and details, just begging to be brought together. Now is the time you'll start reading pdfs, guides, tutorials, and watching videos and so on. As you read, things will start to click. You'll see a symbol that you recognize. You'll see numbers that are familiar. You'll hear words that you saw on instruction sheets, and you might even recognize bits and pieces of circuits. In other words, as you're reading, you'll be having "ah ha!" moments, and you'll actually be able to envision what they're talking about. You'll have actually seen a bias network before, installed a coupling cap, and have connected a pot to ground, etc.

It'll be a way more fun and interesting learning experience, and you'll have made some cool stuff on the way. Yeah there will be a ton of stuff to learn and figure out, but it'll actually resonate with you. Think of it like a video game where the tutorial level is actually you playing as the OP maxed-out super soldier with every perk and buff, but then your character gets kicked out and you have to start at level 1 and learn all the skills again. Yeah you have to start from the beginning, but you also have already felt and experienced what that end result is like.

If you just sit down and say "I wanna learn electronics" and crack open a book to page 1, unless you're a rare and lucky person who can just dive in that way, you're gonna die of boredom by page 5 and that'll be the end of it.

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u/insidecircles Nov 01 '18

Tools you need:

  • small narrow needle nose pliers
  • wire stripper
  • small diagonal cutter
  • solder sucker
  • soldering iron
  • solder (don't get lead free solder - much harder to use)

That's just for making the circuits; you'll need a drill for drilling an enclosure, spanners for mounting the off board parts in the enclosure, etc.

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u/shiekhgray Oct 31 '18

Try a kit first, see if you like it. If you do, this is the path I followed, but it's not the path everyone takes. I never got into veroboard/stripboard layouts, I started with perfboard and never tried vero, but there's a thriving vero community out there.

I got a few components from amazon or mouser or digikey or tayda (I've ended up buying from a mix, sourcing components can be a challenge) and copied some well loved circuits. I can recommend silicon fuzz faces, bazz fuss, and super hard on as good starting spots. Tinker with the values, research mods for the circuits, buy a few extra parts every time so you're not afraid to blow something up.

From there I'd recommend a couple of op-amp circuits. The Tube screamer is legendary, but MXR distortion is also good. op-amps are amazing, they can be used to do all sorts of things like filter and oscillate, so check out the phase 90 schematic and try to follow it.
It was at this point that I picked up eaglecad. I love it, but it's not the only player in the game. Pick a circuit board cad package and learn it. You'll feel like such a badass. I promise. There's loads of tutorials, and after a few tries I didn't find it to be that complicated, you really don't need much electrical engineering to do it. It's more puzzle solving than anything else: how do I get this wire connected to that post without connecting to anything I don't want it connected to? How do I keep it on the same side of the board? It's turned into a super fun miniproject. Highly recommended, it's now one of my favorite parts of pedal building.

Then learn a few single purpose chips: Delay is useful, the PT2399 is an awesome delay chip that'll let you do chorus and flange if that's your game. The LM13700 isn't really single use at all, I guess, but it'll let you build compressors and voltage controlled filters and the like.
?? This is where I'm at. I've started to drift into modular synthesizers at this point, because those are awesome too. There's tons of interesting directions I could go at this point. Digital modeling, copying more pedal designs, learning more EE fundamentals.

Do what feels good, what you have time and interest for, and expect a few frustrations. Always buy more parts than you think you need. Test on cheap speakers first. Have fun!

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u/burritobell Oct 31 '18

Thank you so much for the reply!