Getting Started - Check Yourself

I'll be honest, I started building guitar effects because I couldn't afford the originals. I'm a poor college student and, at the moment, my time is worth far less to me than my money so cloning a pedal is worth my time and fits my budget. But that's an important factor with this kind of work. I want to spend this post examining whether or not you should start building your own effects. So without further ado, let's dive in and answer a few questions (and you really need to be honest with yourself here).

1. Is it worth 8 hours of your time to build one overdrive? (with some great effects only being $100)
2. Are you OK with spending 3-4 hours fault testing a broken circuit? (and then throwing it away when you can't fix it)
3. Does the idea of burning through your circuit and starting from scratch frustrate you?
4. Does the idea of burning through your skin cause you great anxiety?
5. Are you prepared to spend forever wiring the circuit into the enclosure?
6. Are you prepared to spend another 4 hours painting your enclosure?
7. Do you need graphics on your pedals?
8. Do you intend to build more than one pedal?

Depending on how you answered those questions, frankly, this might not be your cup of tea. 

It's been my personal experience that when you're building a pedal you will screw something up on almost every build, you will mess up the paint on your enclosure and need to start over, you will burn yourself on your soldering iron, and you most certainly will wire something backwards and ask yourself "why isn't this working?" for several hours. This all goes triple for your first build. I'm going to do my best to help you if decide this is what you want to do, but be prepared to spend a long time working on your first pedal.

Now after being a rather Negative Nancy I'll ask you a few more questions.

1. Do you want to know why your Ibanez Tubescreamer sounds different from your friend's Fulltone OCD?
2. Do you want to know how to tweak the pedals you already have in a more intelligent way than guesswork?
3. Do you find working with your hands enjoyable?
4. Do you want the satisfaction of knowing the tone you hear really has come "from your fingers"?

As a computer engineering student I spend a lot of time building projects that I'll never look at again once I finish them. But a pedal is different. When I'm done with a pedal I can use it for years and allow it to inspire me to create new music or effects. This is the part I enjoy the most. Pedal building can be frustrating and mind boggling at times. But when I finally finish one (after debugging) and hear that first chord run through it and come out the amp, it is deeply satisfying to know that the tone I hear truly comes from my hands.

So if you answered "Yes" to those last questions, then go ahead and continue on to the next post. But if you answered "No" then I really urge you to save up the cash and support some of the fantastic builders out there right now.

But for those of you ready to move on, then let's look at some necessary tools