Component quality

[edde]

I'm gonna build some pedals and i'm searching for some good sites to buy the components. I found that some sites are a lot cheaper than others, like less then half price, especially sites who don't focus on pedals but on electronics in general. The components looks the same so are there any difference? Can a carbon film resistor be better than another carbon film resistor? I guess some components like capacitors are more important?

And what type of resistors is the best? Metal film or carbon film and what wattage should i use?

[Mark Hammer]

Many companies can sell the same items for very different prices, often because they managed to buy them from the manufacturer, or some middleman, for different prices. Some places may get different volume discounts.

When I received an order from Tayda earlier this year, I was somewhat taken aback by the thin leads on the resistors I got. There was nothing wrong with them, but some folks may want sturdier leads for doing things like vertical mounting, or even point-to-point wiring.

There are circumstances where component quality matters, but if you're on this forum and looking to build stuff for yourself, you can be pretty well assured that quality is not going to matter for about 8-10 pedals from now. I don't so that to insult you. Rather, much of what you're going to make will not have critical components, you'll make mistakes and have do-overs, and certainly there is going to be a couple of distortions in there, right? Component quality is not going to matter. Some folks make a big to-do about capacitors, and while there are circumstances where type/quality may matter, those circumstances typically don't occur in "our" world.

For the time being, make sure you have parts with the right voltage and wattage ratings (caps should be at least 25v rated to suit most guitar/bass builds, resistors should be 1/4w for pedals), make sure you use sockets for your chips and transistors so you can try out different ones and not overheat anything during installation.

Small Bear Electronics caters to both hobbyist builders, as well as boutique companies, and even larger ones. They can be a little pricier on some things than a bigger company, but they'll have just about everything you need. One of their stock lines is starter packs for guys like you, with a selected assortment of parts to make a variety of pedals. VERY good and fast and considerate service. You'll find other places you might like more as you go along, but to start out you can't go wrong with Small Bear. Owner Steve Daniels began the company getting special bulk deals for folks on the DIY Stompbox forum, and eventually, over the course of a decade, it just kinda sorta turned into a thriving business. He has commercial clients, but still feels a deep responsibility to little guys like you and I. http://www.smallbearelec.com/home.html

So for heaven's sake, GET BUILDING!

[edde]

Most of the time i will build clones and i want them to be perfect. I will try to build most of them point-to-point on a blank pcb. I will probably order from small bear.

Do you have any tips and tricks for point to point wiring? Do any of the components cause interference? Do some kind of components pick up interference? All i know is that all currents cause some minor electromagnetic fields so cables(currents) with opposite direction should be twisted so that the field cancels out.

[Mark Hammer]

You will want to keep inputs away from outputs where possible, and you don't want long wires dangling over stages with high gain. Typically, the things most folks end up building are things with higher gain, but if they don't have high gain, layout is much less of a problem.

Is it worth it wanting to make clones that are "perfect"? I dunno. Many pedals from the "golden era" have a lot of pedal-to-pedal variation, because of component tolerances, and sometimes because parts were changed over successive issues. You've probably read about how hard it is to find a "good" Fuzz Face from back then. Many components change over time such that what we hear from a mid-1960s pedal today may not reflect how that pedal sounded in 1968. In an interview I read with EHX president Mike Matthews a couple years ago, he noted that you could take 4 Big Muffs off the line and no two would sound alike.

So the question is: "What are you trying to perfect?".

Personally, I wouldn't sweat it. Build it, and tweak. If it sounds good, great. It not, change something or just chalk it up to experience.

And if you have not done so yet, go and join the diystompbox forum. As fine a resource for pedal-building as this site is for amp-building. Great bunch of people.

[edde]

I'll will join diystompbox forum. I have built some BYOC project and some of them have som subtle hiss or noise. A perfect tone for me is free from noise and the pedal will not alter the tone in other ways than it is supposed to. Im curious about building a fuzz, someting that sounds like hendrix. It seams like a djungle of diffrent types and similar components of diffrent year/brand.