EE approach to designing pedals

[jp1390]

Hi all, new here.

I have an electrical engineering background (currently finishing up school) and I guess that sort of mentality has stayed with me for designing projects. I am really interested in guitar effects and I am starting to dive a bit deeper into design.

When it comes to audio, what is heard definitely attributes to effects are designed and I am slowly getting a better ear for this stuff, but it is a steep curve considering my background.

I am wondering if anyone is either in the same boat as myself, have been, or is on the other side of the spectrum and has less of a technical background but a good ear for designing.

How do you approach a new design?

Cheers,
JP

[madbean]

I have no EE background although I did a degree in the sciences. I'd say it helps but not at all required. The thing that helps me most from my education is actually more from the problem solving angle. All those endless hours of math proofs and theory definitely trained my little brain to approach problems in a very consistent and logical way. I expect you have a bit more advantage because you already have that plus some good training on the engineering aspect, too.

Designing audio effects is pretty equally divided between knowing how the stuff works and also knowing what is a good end result. The latter is probably the more difficult thing to master because it includes applying your own taste and biases in evaluating the result. When you are designing something for more than yourself, you have to develop a sense of what will either have a broad appeal or be cool and unique enough that a niche market of folks will identify and embrace it. IMO, you get to that point by 1) working on designs (your own or others) and evaluating the results over and over again and then some more and 2) keeping in tune with what's already out there and what is popular.

Most of us already have an innate ability to choose between good tone and bad tone since we are musicians (most of us anyway) and probably have a few years experience playing. Your ear has already been training for that part.

Anyway, while I don't know if there is a "best" approach, there are certainly common practices.
1) Evaluate some effects to identify what you like and what others like.
2) Pick them apart by either reverse engineering them or analyzing schematics.
3) Compare and evaluate different approaches taken to achieve those end results.
4) Use that knowledge to foster your own creative ideas.
5) Borrowing/stealing from others is totally fine in the world of electronics BUT put something of yourself in it, too. IOW, there is nothing wrong with building on a good idea that someone else came up with but the way to really make your mark is by adding your own creative element to it.
6) Test, test test. Review, revise. Test, test test.

Number 6 is the really important one! It's not uncommon to revise your idea a few times. Even much later after you think something is completed. Your taste and your ears evolve and once you get feedback from a broad set of other sets of ears you might decide on a better or different way to do things.

[midwayfair]

Hi, Jason, welcome to the forum! Good to see you here.

Since I come from a non-engineering background and my only science background is a basic interest, I'm definitely more from the opposite end of the spectrum. I tend to have an end goal in mind and then I do whatever I need to to reach it, even if it means methodically changing every component on a breadboarded circuit until it does what I need.

Although I have some rules about a design I release -- it must be simple (to build and use), it can't use obscure or expensive parts that no one has, and it must have one unusual trick up its sleeve to make it versatile -- I don't really have to make considerations about selling it to others, but I work on this principle in any artistic endeavor:

If it pleases me, a vanishingly small percentage of the population, I figure it'll be good enough for the rest.
-Chris Smither on songwriting

Doesn't get the crowds out to shows or have people banging my door down, but I've gotten a few things I'm happy with out of this idea!

[jp1390]

Thank you for the kind words and advice.

The work that I am putting in to these projects is pretty much for myself. Not trying to make a gig out of this. Purely curiosity and an inner passion to create something using the bits of knowledge that I have gained here and there, both technical and non-technical.

I feel like it will be a battle between what sounds right and the math checking out for me, but I will fight it to the bitter end! It all comes down to a healthy balance.

JP

[culturejam]

Welcome! It's good to have an EE on board.   

The "pros" that sell a lot of the boutique pedals often have a rather negative view of EEs in general. And it's mostly because EEs *know* that many of the claims made in the marketing are total horseshit. 

I'm sure many of us will be interested to pick your brain on why certain things work they way they do.

[jp1390]

Welcome! It's good to have an EE on board.   

The "pros" that sell a lot of the boutique pedals often have a rather negative view of EEs in general. And it's mostly because EEs *know* that many of the claims made in the marketing are total horseshit. 

I'm sure many of us will be interested to pick your brain on why certain things work they way they do.

Thanks! I will try my best to keep up!

[pickdropper]

I think a challenging thing for an engineer with this can be to listen to what it sounds like as opposed to listening with your eyes (ie: looking at the results on test equipment).

After working with audio for a while, a lot of folks can see the frequency response and understand what it will sound like.  IMHO, it is still important to stop and actually listen to it as well.  One's eyes can introduce bias from time to time.

Now, I am not discounting the value of proper testing.  Far from it.  Just pointing out the value of actual listening.

[electricstorm]

Hi JP!

And again, welcome to the forum. I, myself, have worked in the electronics field most of my life and enjoy it quite a bit. I am not an EE however. Although designing/creating circuits is not what I'm best at I do like to try to create some effects for different sounds and experiment a bit. What I am good at is reverse engineering and repair of electronic circuits. I just recently received my 2-year degree in Electrical/Electronics and this has helped me a bit. Other than that, I really don't have a degree in electronics  (since the degree I do have was more for electrical wiring, but touched on electronics a little) and have learned most of what I know with hands on experience.

Brian gives some really great advice and the rest of the forum members here are very helpful when it comes to answering questions and helping you figure something out. Like Pickdropper suggests, listen to the results of your creations and "look" at the math and use the testing to help get you where you want to go with it. Sometimes the technical part doesn't always yield a great sounding circuit and sometimes it allows us to stumble onto to something unique.

Again, welcome and enjoy!

Jim

[madbean]

I'll add one more bit:

When I first took the leap from building whatever clone designs I liked to trying out my own ideas about five years ago, I spent lots and lots of time drawing out schematics by hand. I would do this to get an understanding of how to put the circuits together properly. Thing is, most of time I was taking the "intellectual" approach, i.e. I would construct filters based on how I knew the math worked, what the frequency response was supposed to be, etc. etc. And, they all sounded terrible! Just god-awful.

That's when I realized that I was neglecting the second component to design too much: the listening and ear training part. IOW, putting in time on the breadboard, or just building something and socketing the hell out of it so you can quickly swap out components and listen to the results is probably the single best thing you can do to gain instant progress. It is more important than being clever on your schematics and/or layouts (the thing that is the most fun for me).

[jkokura]

As a builder who has very little electrical knowledge, and who dabbles in design, I cannot stress enough the importance of experimentation. Much of the reason some mass produced pedals are duds or poor is simply because they are well 'engineered' which takes out much of the musicality. That's why the Silverface amps from Fender are much maligned while the blackface and Tweed amps are loved - CBS took the imperfectly engineered designs and then ruined them. They became 'sterile' and not as popular or musical.

Like Brian said - paper design is no replacement for the breadboard. Prototyping is a time consuming, but very enjoyable process. The good middle step is to take an established design and tweak it.

Jacob

[JakeFuzz]

I am a mechanical engineer in a physics/material science field. I had to take quite a few EE courses a while back. What I find most interesting about guitar effects and amplifiers is that we tend to make things that EE people probably wouldn't design specifically for. A lot of my courses were designing within the limitations of a particular device. In one of my labs we would be using a basic transistor circuit and the teacher would show us the transistor hitting the saturation and cut-off regions and say "now see this is very bad for your amplifier circuit, this is what you don't want to happen". Yet when you look at most amplifiers or fuzz circuits you are driving the crap out of your amplification device to purposely obtain saturation. It is the interesting little quirks that have come out of someone tinkering and listening to a circuit that make the odd effects we have today sound great. The univibe is a non-harmonic type example that EE's would probably laugh at. If I told the EE guys upstairs I was going to design a phase shift amplifier with an incandescent light bulb in it they probably wouldn't talk to me again. But that super non-linear response of the bulb gives us that asymmetric wobble sound that people have been using forever. I think this mashing of science and the consonance of electronics is what I love about guitar effects so much.