Why did you start building?

[jubal81]

Sometimes when I build something that sounds really good and toss it in the 'maybe box it one day' pile I could just about kick myself because my noob self would have gone bananas over it.

Exactly this!

Cody

I miss the old me sometimes ...

[selfdestroyer]

Haha perfect analogy.

[blearyeyes]

Well I managed a music shop in the 80s and sold guitars and pedals and keys and everything. Out of all the distortions I really loved the Marshall Guv'nur. Never owned one as I used a preamp in my git and got dirt out of my amps directly. I also used a Boss CH-2 live for many years. Jump forward 30 years. I want to gear up for church.  I figured a Boss Chorus was a Boss Chorus... Nope.  I had a Marshall Valvestate 2000 that blew up. I couldn't afford another amp so I decided I was going to fix it... Joined the Music Electronics Forum and through those great guys helping out a newbie (who thought he could solder), and after many many hours with a lightbulb limiter I actually fixed the damn thing much to their surprise and mine. It wasn't pretty but it's still working. So I decided I would finally get that Marshall Guv'nur I had sold so many of. Found a circuit board and bought the parts and proceeded to build what looks like a monkey threw solder at a piece of pegboard..lmao. What a mess. I did get it to work though. The next step was to get my CH-2 back.  It was all over at that point. 

[billstein]

Sometimes when I build something that sounds really good and toss it in the 'maybe box it one day' pile I could just about kick myself because my noob self would have gone bananas over it.

Exactly this!

Cody

I miss the old me sometimes ...

That is the funniest thing I've seen in awhile AND it is so true. It used to be the amazing Rangemaster I just built with just a plain box and no artwork. I'd just sit and stare at that amazing feat in wonder. Now it is " Yeah I guess the Aquaboy Deluxe I just finished, with it's etched faceplate and Envirotex is alright... You know ... Whatever..." We suck.

[lincolnic]

I started playing guitar at 14, but the only pedal I ever really had was a little Guyatone delay (which I still have, and love). I was always super interested in them, though. "I can make my guitar sound like something else? Awesome!" They were always too expensive to really buy any, though.

Fast forward several years to 2008 or 2009...my oldest friend decided he was going to start learning guitar too, and he got a few pedals right away (a black Russian Big Muff, don't remember what else). Somehow we both discovered BYOC at the same time, and like all of us, I was seduced at how cheap building your own seemed to be. I jumped in with their Mouse kit, and was amazed when it fired right up. I was immediately hooked.

Sometime right before I built that kit, I'd bought an actual Zvex Woolly Mammoth (which cost a lot of money for a poor underemployed kid). I figured that since I could build a Rat, maybe I could sell the Mammoth and build a replacement? A little searching on the BYOC forums directed me to Madbean, who was then selling home-etched circuits via his monthly mailing list. After that, there was no helping me. I've spent way more on this "cheap" hobby than I ever would have on production pedals, and I'm pretty satisfied knowing that at least I made all my toys by hand.

[Dulouz]

Been playing guitar since 1996 although... I sound like I have been playing since Christmas 

Still wish I could play guitar better though... 

Story of my life.

About two years ago I wanted a SHO, but couldn't afford the price. Found IVIark's Tagboard Effects and built one on vero. Then started building for buddies and never stopped.

[add4]

Sometimes when I build something that sounds really good and toss it in the 'maybe box it one day' pile I could just about kick myself because my noob self would have gone bananas over it.

Exactly this!

Cody

I miss the old me sometimes ...

haha!

[juansolo]

That is so nailed on.

It's comes at the point you've built and heard just about everything and nothing really excites you any more. You see them get all stoked up about the new Boutique fad over on FSB and think, meh, YATS. Is it snobbish? I don't know. But it takes something properly interesting to excite me these days.

[add4]

I started playing guitar at 13. Mainly played 90s rock stuff at the beggining, had a rock bad at school. I used a solid state laney amp which has decent cleans and a horrible dirt cheannel (later, i used that channel to get a massive wall of distortion that i defined as 'putting your ear against a truck motor'). when one friend at school showed me the only pedal he had, i was super excited... that's how real distortion was made!!. So spent all my earnings to buy pedals in the following years.
in the end, i had : dod grunge (1st pedal i bought .. regretted it every time i turned it on ), dod flanger, dunlop wah, boss compressor, danelectro cool cat chorus (actually thought it sounded pretty cool when used is stereo, in my 2 channel amp, really changed the sound to give more space), TS5, and other pedals i don't even remember (bought a used pedalboard from a local band, with a lot of crappy DOD pedals). When i was 17, i discovered DIYstomboxes and i was super excited but at the time i was impossible for me to buy online so i went to a local electronic store and tried to buy vero, resistors, caps and pots. went back home, followed the step by step instructions to make a boost using my father's soldering iron with a huge tip and too much wattage... made a mess with the circuit, only got oscillation noise out of it. tried anotber time ... it worked .. but then i had to make a millenium bypass, and i only had a plastic box .. i had to make holes into it. the plastic box would never be as good as the metal ones and i could not source anything .. it seemed to hard.. i stopped thinking about all this.

a few years later, at university, learning physics, i took the most practical course of the whole physics department : analogic electronics, hoping i'd FINALLY understand how it all works. So i saw the basics amplifier stages with transistors, opamps, and stuff. then i showed a schematic to the teacher hoping he'd help me build a bluesbreaker as a personal project .. and all he could do was analyse voltages and stuff.. tried to build it .. same story, impossible to source componenets locally, found some componenets, soldered them, oscillation and noise again, i had no idea how to debug it.

a few years later, i started studying guitar seriously since i now love modern jazz and gypsy jazz. i thought, i would like to change my guitar pickup, i know i can solder 2 wires, let's do it.. This time i bought a decent soldering iron (15 euros) and it WORKED.. so i thought ... why not try a stopbox again.. i foudn musikding, really low price kits.. i ordered a tremolo, made it work ... and went into havoc.
i spend nights looking at schematics on the net, compiling informations, learning eagle, buying some pcbs, but mainly making my own designs and etching them. and i started making complete pedals. the bigger problem for me being the hardware part: drilling, painting, labelling, ...

I found that it stopped my progression at guitar so i tried to balance both. Also you don't need all these fancy effects in jazz so it slowed me down too.. but i still have this fascination for effects and love building.

Then i had my 2 children, a very demanding work, my workbench was transformed into a baby's bedroom and the solder fumes are replaced by teddybears, and here i am today. I take the time to take all the material and build my temporary workbench during the evenings when i'm not too tired, and when i don't want to play guitar. Playing and practicing to become a better player still being my absolute priority. In the end, both playing and building pedals feel a bit pointless since i don't have the time to play in a band, or see how i would use any of these pedals in a jazz band setting, but i still do it as an intellectual and fun hobby. like some would build small trains or airplanes. Also i want to have a badass pedalboard when i have more time and i'm back playing with a band

And i love the community !

[televisiondown]

Started with a DOD Classic fuzz and a TS9 in my high school band. The fuzz didn't work out, so I bought a Sovtek Big Muff (Tall Font). That lead to a Sovtek Small Stone and then some Ebay purchases: early 70s MXR Dist +, 70s ADA Flanger and an old Stereo Memory Man. Some bands later, our stupid drummer got drunk one night, took a bat to my Big Muff and the footswitch never worked well after that. Between wanting to learn how to fix the pedal and then finding out I could make my own Fender Blender, I found BYOC and a few YouTube videos to learn how to solder. Now I'm up to 20+ mostly successful builds and I still haven't rehoused that Big Muff OR built a Fender Blender! Haha

I still get excited every time I finish a new build. I just wish I was still playing with a band.

[Muadzin]

It used to be that the very thought of even picking up a soldering iron had me screaming for cover. That was magical technology. The few times I needed something to be soldered, I think some kill switches in my guitars I asked others to do it for me. What probably really kickstarted it for me was buying an Boss SD-1 on the Dutch version of Craigslist. It came with a still unused Monte Allums mod kit. Naturally I asked a friend to do it. But I watched intently and came to the conclusion that it wasn't that hard. So I purchased a few more mods, bought some cheap 2nd hand Boss pedals and damn, it worked!

Then one day I came across BYOC kits being sold in one of my favorite guitar shops and it was like the dawn of a new age. I was in a Radiohead tribute band and now finally I had a chance to get some of those rare out of production pedals, like the DOD 440. And thus the addiction got born. Not everything worked at first. In those days I had like a 50+% chance of producing a dud. I was blessed however that I discovered a solder jockey in my city who could fix almost anything. He's known on places like FSB and DIYSB as Bernarduur. If you google for a Big Muff mod page, his page will come up on top. Nice guy, who fixed my duds. And in doing so he probably helped to keep my flame alive. Not that I learned much of him, but otherwise the frustration of all those failed builds would have caused me to give up in disgust. As it almost did a few times. After BYOC came GGG, which caused my OCD with topmounting all my jacks from now on, and the discovery that you could order boards only, from Tonepad at first, and later the first etched boards from Madbean. Sourcing my own builds, using Smallbear at first, was often quite a source of frustration as you would always forget a part, or order the wrong one. And I didn't have whole bins full of stocked spare parts at that time.

The final step I'd say was when Bernarduur moved away and could no longer fix my mistakes. In no time my box of fail grew to epic proportions and I contemplated giving up entirely as there was no fun any more in building stuff that in most cases didn't work. Over time however I found that I still liked to build things and I forced myself to learn more about troubleshooting. Can't say that I'm the best at it, but I learned how to use the 3 most indispensable tools for troubleshooting, the audio probe, the DMM and how to read schematics (up until I was a layout only kind of guy). I wouldn't say I'm good. I totally lack basic knowledge of electronics, but I managed to increase my success rate from less then 50% to 90%. My box of fail has emptied considerably and few new things go in there these days.

[Willybomb]

I choose to begin my story now:

I starting playing guitar at 13, but always enjoyed putting things together and/or pulling them apart.  They never went back the same way - behold my cheap Watch and Game copy that I pulled apart to have a look at the internals, or the walkie talkies my grandmother gave me and my brother, or the plethora of plastic airplanes I built (some of which were shot with a rubber band peg gun later on).  My Tamiya Frog has survived, mostly, but has been upgraded to better suspension, bumpers, and the high speed motor.

I started out putting aftermarket pickups into my guitars and refinishing them.  I had a Korg a5 that I save up with my after school job, then I went to a DS-1/crybaby/TS-10 combo into a Roland DAC-50.  Later I figured I only really needed one sound and got a VS-102r cheap and used that for everything for years.

I always admired Brian May's Red Special, and generally I like to build things that I will use, or more commonly, things that I think are cool.

I can't remember exactly why or how I found about modding (one of) my DS-1 pedals, but I found an instructable on how to do the keely mods and went from there.  I decided I wanted a chorus and got Haberdasher to etch me a Little Angel and a Krankasaurus.  I got a little obsessed with the idea of dirt/boost in one box for a while there and now I've built the boneyard, dead ringer, a sprout/SHO combo, Ammocan, and the Kranky.

After I got a Blackstar HT-Dual and decided it sounds like godinabox, I decided to downsize and I got rid of my vs-102r and my bass amp, replaceing them with a single powered PA speaker, so the Boneyard in particular is an effort to get a 9v version of my *sound* (lol) instead of the power supply shenannigans that having a 16vac pedal requires.  Random Stranger is the response to needing a front end for playing bass straight into a PA.

I haven't built a *huge* number of pedals, and I think the number of failed veros is probably equal to the number of completed boxes..  Although..... thinking about it, the number of successful veros greatly outnumbers the boxes due to the multis I build!

You know, I think I'm just about done.  I just have to box this Dead Ringer etch, a madbean Hipster, a Crunchbox on vero, possibly a TS-9 on vero, and I think I'm finished.  Don't see the need to build any more pedals.  I'm going to do a 9v battery pedal powered pedalboard, and a Cioks AC-10 powered board for the HT-dual and some sort of multi, probably a Zoom G3x since it has the balanced XLR outs plus all the other effects and leave it at that I think.

Maybe one more DI cabsim with balanced outs type affair (terminus junior), but probably not.

[chuckbuick]

Before I started building a few years ago I had only owned a handful effects in the 20+ years I had been playing.  I discovered BYOC and thought it would be fun and maybe a cheaper alternative to buying gear and experimenting with new sounds.

But mainly I do it for the chicks.

[Luke51411]

But mainly I do it for the chicks.

Are you talking about the ones Juansolo puts on his enclosures?

[chuckbuick]

Sadly, yes.  Now he knows why I click "like" on his Facebook pedal pics at 2 o'clock in the morning.