Why did you start to build?

[irmcdermott]

This is a spin off of something I just said in another thread, that I thought might be a cool topic. What made you start to build? Was it curiosity? Necessity (no money to buy boutique pedals)? Or something else?

For me it was a mixture of the first two. Here's my story, copied from the other thread. I can't wait to read some of yours.

"The Woolly Mammoth is the pedal that started this whole thing for me. I really wanted one for my bass, but definitely couldn't swing the $359 price tag. So out of curiosity, I searched to see what was on the inside that made it cost so much. Then I stumbled upon the FSB thread on it, and was shocked that I could build my own for like $30. I dove in head first and etched a board based on Brian's layout, and never turned back. The rest is history. "

Ian

[eldanko]

Hey, you DID make a new thread!  Yayz 

My wife bought me a BYOC Chorus kit for my birthday a couple of years ago.  I hadn't even thought of building my own stuff before that.  I ended up doing 3 BYOC kits before finding this page and continuing on with it.

The "name brand" pedals that I've sold after doing my own builds have literally paid for pretty much all of the parts and equipment that I've bought thus far, so it's been a relatively cheap hobby if you look at it that way!

[lloyd17]

My start with this hobby is pretty convoluted but it's fun. I had just sold my El Capistan in anticipation of the Timeline release when Strymon sold out in like a minute. After getting over my disappointment I  began thinking about a delay pedal that costs as much as a refrigerator, painful sales tax as I am 30 miles away from Strymon and used prices unlikely to drop below retail for a long time, if ever. This lead to thinking about alternatives to the Timeline while still getting some of those sounds and just how many pedals I could build for 500 bucks so I started researching builds and ordering parts.

Now I have an Echo Base happily living in a parallel effects mixer with phasers and trems and [soon] filters. All of my commercial effects have been sold and my DIY dirt collection is growing nicely. This has lead to a nice little unexpected benefit: While I have never gotten along well enough with Muffs to justify a pricey boutique variant I can most certainly justify having a 48 dollar Muff that has been well tuned to my rig. So now I have pedals in the build queue that I never would have considered owning at 200 bucks but 50 sits really nicely!

PS: phase modulated delay repeats are about the coolest sounds around!

[JakeFuzz]

PS: phase modulated delay repeats are about the coolest sounds around!

That is brilliant! What if you could make a pt2399 based delay and process the repeat signal only with modulation effects before they are blended with the dry signal and sent through the feedback! Holy smokes this may be my next project...

I started building when I was a kid. Never had any money so I figured I could build expensive pedals for nothing. I started with treble boosters (I was digging the Brian May tone at the time). After that I didn't build anything for a while. Many years later in college I began fixing and modifying the production pedals I had and discovered that it would be relatively inexpensive to build pedals from scratch. Someone over at FSB pointed me here when I went asking for a Klon PCB.

[keysandguitars]

I sold my amp via eBay to Paul (chromesphere)  who turned me on to pedal building. I'm a gear whore at heart, like to tinker with stuff, love good tone and figured why not. I built a BYOC OD2 to get my feet wet. Paul convinced me that etching, sourcing parts, enclosure finishing isn't as difficult as it sounds. With his kind and generous help, he directed me to this forum and away I went. I still feel like a total noob, but I'm learning with every build...I think.

I really enjoy building the circuits and playing and seeing the finished product. I also enjoy the people on this forum. You guys have been a huge help and are incredibly generous and kind with your time and knowledge. Usually, forums get filled with flame wars and turn into pissing matches, I haven't seen a single one here.

I think I've got 11 builds to date, just waiting for decals and clear powder coating and I'll start posting some build reports. I've also built an amp which was a huge challenge, but incredibly rewarding. I know I'm not designing the circuits I'm building and owe the credit to Madbean and others, but it is gratifying to assemble these things, strike a big chord and bask in the juicy tone which I have soldered together.

[timbo_93631]

I have worked on tube amps since I was in high school and really never used too many pedals.  I think the first one I bought was a Danelectro DanEcho in the 90's and I also bought the cream colored overdrive they were making, but I sold it right away as i didn't care for it.  After that I didn't use anything besides the DanEcho until I got an Italian Vox Crybaby from a pal as a gift.  I had no idea what it was worth when he gave it to me, but it did get me on the path of modding wah pedals.  I sold it a 4 years ago and missed it badly, so I bought a V847 and modded it with a whipple inductor, true bypass, and some resistor changes.  It sounded good, but I wanted another vintage wah so I sold it on ebay and made some good money on the deal.  That made me realize that I could mod a few v847's a month and have some extra money to play with.  I started with Vox V847 true bypass conversions, and doing inductor and resistor swaps, but now I go as far as doing conversions to the small italian style PCB, changing caps, and transistors.  I got a lowrey organ that is chock full of 2n2924 and 2n2925's, literally hundreds,  so I can swap MPSA18's out of V847's and GCB95's for some time to come.  
   Then I build a BYOC ESV 2 knob bender for a buddy.  That did it, I realized that I could do all the tooling of the enclosure and source parts myself and save alot over BYOC kits.  Then I found GGG and built my first rangemaster clone, the next I did on eyelets, that was my nephew's christmas present last year.  After that I built the Bad Stone that was worked up on FSB.  I have gotten really serious about building in the past 12 months or so, way less amplifiers, way more pedals.  Aquaboy, Echobase, Boomstick, Uproar, 1 knob fuzz, fatpants, many more rangemasters.  Last winter I figured I had bought, modded or repaired, then resold 25 wahs, it must be 25 more since then...
     I think the reason I have gotten into pedal building is that you can build something, rock it, and if it isn't what you are looking for you can sell it on ebay and make back everything you had into it plus a little sometimes.   People are willing to buy a pedal from a relatively unknown builder if the youtube demo sounds good.  It is much harder to do that with amplifiers, especially if you are buying the cab from a builder, and having a speaker built by Weber, you can end up with $600-$1000 into an amp pretty easily and might not have the ability to sell it unless you are selling to local players that know your repair/building reputation and are in the market for a handwired PTP amp.  My first 18 watt was a kit from GDS, $1200 was in it when all was said and done and I sold it for $899.  Not good business, but I learned the lesson about sourcing my own parts the hard way, and somewhere in Chicago there is a happy guy with a KILLER 18 watt that was a great deal.  Now I only build amps to order or for personal use, but I experiment heavily with effects builds.  Brian has done such a good job of facilitating my experimentation with his PCB's he should get a freaking award!  On the bench now, Dig Dug, Cosmopolitan, Quadrovibe...  With so many new things getting rolled out I can't wait to get my next order in.  Gonna have to sell some more wahs.

[lloyd17]

That is brilliant! What if you could make a pt2399 based delay and process the repeat signal only with modulation effects before they are blended with the dry signal and sent through the feedback! Holy smokes this may be my next project...

That pretty much what the mixer does with the help of the dry kill mod on the Echo Base. Now I am totally hooked on what kinds of crazy things I can do to delay repeats: filter, octave, fuzz, true chorus! The list goes on and on. One really terrific benefit of being able to effect repeats only is EQ. I built up a SBEQ which is a tad subtle up front but perfect for brightening or darkening the EB's repeats. Plus when one cranks the SBEQ volume the EB input section overdrives pretty nicely for that gritty, dark sound. I like the EB so much it is staying on my main board but I am building up an Urchin with kill dry to go permanently on the 'weird' board along with the parallel mixer, upcoming Lowrider and some kind of filter which at this point will be Taylor's Meatball clone. I am more excited about this stuff every day. Can't wait for Brian's reverb project to get some soupy, reverb-on-the-repeats type sounds happening!

[juansolo]

Used to do some hobby electronics when I was kid. Still had the iron and some other bits that got used for odd things. Dunno what made me decide to do it other than I like building things... Got a BYOC kit and off I went.

Quite addictive.

[madbean]

I owed a lot of money due to a serious gambling problem and a streak of bad luck. My attorney was kind of a wild man but we used to hang out quite a bit. We took a crazy drive through the California desert on our way to Las Vegas for a little story I was hired to write. When we got there we somehow landed at a giant law enforcement convention. My attorney was under the influence of various recreational pharmaceuticals (I, myself, did not partake) so we high-tailed it out of there and stayed in lock-down in our hotel for several days. My attorney went a little nuts and tried to stab me so I hid in the bathroom most of the time. That's when I first registered at DIYstompboxes. I had hours to kill until he came to his senses so I got hooked pretty quick on the pedal thing.

Some other stuff happened after that, but that's the gist.

[jkokura]

Sounds like a Robert Downey Jr. story.

[slimtriggers]

I owed a lot of money due to a serious gambling problem and a streak of bad luck. My attorney was kind of a wild man but we used to hang out quite a bit. We took a crazy drive through the California desert on our way to Las Vegas for a little story I was hired to write. When we got there we somehow landed at a giant law enforcement convention. My attorney was under the influence of various recreational pharmaceuticals (I, myself, did not partake) so we high-tailed it out of there and stayed in lock-down in our hotel for several days. My attorney went a little nuts and tried to stab me so I hid in the bathroom most of the time. That's when I first registered at DIYstompboxes. I had hours to kill until he came to his senses so I got hooked pretty quick on the pedal thing.

Some other stuff happened after that, but that's the gist.

  Fear and Loathing on the Stompbox Trail!

[JakeFuzz]

That is brilliant! What if you could make a pt2399 based delay and process the repeat signal only with modulation effects before they are blended with the dry signal and sent through the feedback! Holy smokes this may be my next project...

That pretty much what the mixer does with the help of the dry kill mod on the Echo Base. Now I am totally hooked on what kinds of crazy things I can do to delay repeats: filter, octave, fuzz, true chorus! The list goes on and on. One really terrific benefit of being able to effect repeats only is EQ. I built up a SBEQ which is a tad subtle up front but perfect for brightening or darkening the EB's repeats. Plus when one cranks the SBEQ volume the EB input section overdrives pretty nicely for that gritty, dark sound. I like the EB so much it is staying on my main board but I am building up an Urchin with kill dry to go permanently on the 'weird' board along with the parallel mixer, upcoming Lowrider and some kind of filter which at this point will be Taylor's Meatball clone. I am more excited about this stuff every day. Can't wait for Brian's reverb project to get some soupy, reverb-on-the-repeats type sounds happening!

Damn the lowrider would be crazy. Every time the signal repeats you would be getting an octave lower/higher depending on where the repeat return point is (before the feedback). Man that would be too cool to play with... Damn another delay project to add to the list 

[jtn191]

my motives were pretty similar to irmcdermott and jcuempire. I caught GAS quickly after picking up guitar--and was just like any TGP-er until I asked myself "why?". Now it's my dream to build mic preamps, amps, etc

The guys in one of my favorite bands, Built to Spill, always alluded to homemade pedals in interviews so I wanted to get into it to chase that tone...

I really wanted a fuzz factory too...frankly because it was marketed to be even more amazing than it actually is  

Damn the lowrider would be crazy. Every time the signal repeats you would be getting an octave lower/higher depending on where the repeat return point is (before the feedback). Man that would be too cool to play with... Damn another delay project to add to the list  

I saw a video that employed that idea, but with an EHX POG and doing the dotted eighth note delay shtick. It was AMAZING

[irmcdermott]

one of my favorite bands, Built to Spill

I. Love. Built to Spill.

[jubal81]

one of my favorite bands, Built to Spill

I. Love. Built to Spill.

Yes. Yes. Yes.