What degree might one take to get into pedal/amp design?

[Groweng]

Post name is fairly self descriptive. I'm interested in formal education on the subject of effects electronics etc for musical purposes. Wandering if anyone has any stories or resources beyond the forum as to getting into this field as a career or serious hobby? Sidenote, I have an associates in electronics (general) looking for something more specific.

Thanks in advance,
Jon

[Steve Conner]

The university I work for offers an "Audio Technology with Electronics" course. We can't be the only ones.
BSc/BSc (Hons) Audio Technology with Electronics | Glasgow Caledonian University | Scotland, UK

On a more modest scale, RG Keen's GEOFEX site is a great resource that explains most of the popular guitar effects circuits. http://www.geofex.com/

[Groweng]

Thank you kindly for the timely and helpful reply sir.

Cheers,
Jon

[J M Fahey]

When (tons of people by the way) asks me the same as you, my answer is:
the shortest path to a *real* knowledge is go to a (School) Library and ask for the Physics course book, preferably written before the 80's , the section which explains "Electricity and Magnetism".
It's usually taught worldwide when you are around 17 to 19 y.o.
Most groan and say, "oh, no !!!"

Read it end to end, and you'll know;
Electricity
Voltage
Current
Power
Capacitor
Resistor
Battery
Galvanometer (the basis of classic needle multimeters)
Frequency
Phase
Conductor
Insulator
Magnet
Transformer
Coil
etc etc etc .
Plus Ohm's Law and a few others.

After that, Electronics is an *application* of those concepts (flus a few extra ones, of course) and you'll "Know" .

[tubeswell]

^works for me too^

[km6xz]

Degree for amp design.....history.

Because that is the closest to vacuum tube theory you will get in a contemporary university engineering program. There is no general commercial application for tubes you it is not taught but that is the norm anyway.
So, study the basic science fundamental to them all, physics, then any electronic technology from any era will be understood.
If on the other hand you want to design microprocessor design, or design with microprocessors, that is accessible now, plus the music labs at places like MIT are quite involved with digital audio systems.
If by "effects/amplifiers" you mean 50-70 year old technology, old text books almost free at used book stores near universities, the 1950s editions of the ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook, the Radiotron Handbook which is valuable in hardbound original but it is available in DVD for a reasonable price. Then dig up every schematic you can find and study them, calculate values expected at various nodes and test them, figure out why they were designed the way they were. After a long time of this you will know of the principles to become creative and design your own. Figure out what is different than expected in an actual working prototype(not just SPICE models) and why it is different than you intended. When you can get more and more predictable results, you can proudly say that you can design effects and amps effectively. After that you can work on figuring out what needs to be created, what is missing and has a potential to being useful. No matter how cool it is, if it does not solve someone's problem, it has little reason for being.

[J M Fahey]

Then dig up every schematic you can find and study them, calculate values expected at various nodes and test them, figure out why they were designed the way they were.

Along other things, I did *exactly* that.
As in:
1) this 12AX7 with 100K as plate load has +260V feeding it and 160V at the plate, so, (Ohm's Law), it's passing 1 mA
2) so it passes 1 mA with 160V , what's the negative voltage at the grid so this happens?
Go check the datasheet curves.
3) Oh !! I need -1.5V at the grid.
So I need 1.5K ohms resistor (Ohm's Law again)
And so on.

I have just designed, fed and biased a classic "Fender" gain stage.
Of course, you have 57.897.548 so called "designers" out there who would have built such a gain stage with the same values with no Math involved

How come?

"Because Leo did it that way"

In fact, Leo himself pulled those values from the 12AX7 RCA Datasheet, where it's one of the examples, so why go the hard way and actually calculate something?
Because if the voltage available is not one of the examples *or* you want a different bias point so it clips differently (the idea is "Designing your own", not "cloning to death the same 3 or 4 old designs", you want Design to be exciting or boring?) you *will* have to cook your own.

After a long time of this you will know of the principles to become creative and design your own. Figure out what is different than expected in an actual working prototype(not just SPICE models) and why it is different than you intended. When you can get more and more predictable results, you can proudly say that you can design effects and amps effectively. After that you can work on figuring out what needs to be created, what is missing and has a potential to being useful. No matter how cool it is, if it does not solve someone's problem, it has little reason for being.

Well , that's the point.

Oh, let me add something: what if you want to design with a tube which is *NOT* a 12A*7 ???
What will you do, huh?

I have bought 1000 (yes, one thousand) ECC189 for U$250.
Yes, beautiful Russian made double triodes, 60's vintage, for 25 cents each.

"Nobody wants them"
"They are useless"
Really?
Well, in their minds it's so, neither Leo nor Jim Marshall used them, so ......

Ok, keep thinking that way, while I have an inexhaustible supply of NOS double triodes at 25 cents each, with many more to come.
I can buy 10000 tomorrow at that price (or less) if I want to.

Oh !!! but I had to actually design to use them !!!

Yea, sure.
Big deal !!!

By the way, the successful Matchless Clubman 35 includes a "TV Pentode" (6SH7) as the main gain stage.

He was fed up with the lack of usable "guitar approved" EF86 which either are just plain bad modern ones, or the worst of the NOS which after years of culling the "good" ones out have only left the worst: microphonic (the worst defect), hummy, hissy, gassy, you name it.
So he got a thousand perfect 6SH7 (also for peanuts) and had to (gasp) design.

A friend of mine, Max Fillies from Rio, Brazil, makes killer sounding amps *only* with TV Tubes, go figure.

Fender clones? What for?

[km6xz]

Yes, there are a lot more tubes out than the 12AX7 and few people work with them. Hobbyists building one or even small companies building hundreds of a model can design around many of those interesting tubes. But a mass production outfit like Fender or Marshall have only 2 considerations: Can we get a hundred thousand from multiple sources for cheap and will they last for the tube warranty period? Sound, noise, long life really are not as important so everyone uses the same medium performance tubes.
Any way you look at it, the EF86 is better than a 12AX7 for shielding, noise and microphonics but what is left in stocks are culls as you say or outright rejects from decades ago.
The Nuvistor was designed for very low noise and some models were very good but the only one that was available in common use was the 6CW4 which was not intended to be good in microphonics, only good gain at UHF and VHF frequencies, which it was.
Some like the 8058 and 7895 worked really well in mics and preamps, where quiet, last years, and 7586 was used the famous C-12a AKG mics. The 7586 and tetrode 7587 were used in the first high performance mostly solid state scope, designed by Fairchild.
I was given a large batch of Svetlana tubes by a retired engineer, who cataloged them and tested them years ago before storing them. There are some really interesting tubes there, some look like they would be suitable in power amps in excess of what a KT88 can handle.

So, for someone learning how to best interface interesting tubes to modern circuits, it is going to be a situation where history, clever new uses for older technology, and understanding of current application all fit as needed skills.

[Steve Conner]

I foresee a lot more vacancies for DSP programmers than tube circuit designers. Just sayin.

[J M Fahey]

I foresee a lot more vacancies for DSP programmers than tube circuit designers. Just sayin.

Definitely.
And even more vacancies for salesmen than for Enginers of any kind
Even in China they are now having this problem where they have "too many" Engineers and "not enough" Factory workers.
In CHINA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/bu...anted=all&_r=0

But here we are answering the OP who stated that *he* wants to "get into pedal/amp design"

By the way, I did exactly the same ..... but I had to grow my own Factory, Brand, Market, etc.
Not many ads in the Newspapers (as in=Zero/none/zilch) asking for somebody with my skills.

[km6xz]

Sound and electronics never pays well because it closely related to hobbies so to live most have to start their own business. So it appeals to people who would never want a regular job and depend on a company for security. I had only one job in my life. A bit after I got married at 23, my wife insisted on my getting a job with benefits and security. I gave my interest in a small but successful manufacturing business to the partners and went to work for a company that wanted me to design fault detection equipment for nuclear reactors using acoustic emission technology. It was a small company and although everyone there was an engineer I quickly realized why I never wanted to work for anyone. I hated it, I think most of all because they played Muzak in my office with instructions to not defeat it. I left at 3 months and went back to recording and design line amps and EQ for broadcast stations and studios. So, since I was 13, my income from my own doing has been continuous except for the 3 months in that job. That appeals to a lot of people even though it is much more hectic and time consuming than working for someone. Managing staff is the biggest headache because there type of people who seek jobs are usually not the people who want to be self employed and are therefore not entirely on the same page in attitude or thinking.
If someone has a variety of skills needed to go their own way, they can have security in that, plus can do anything else they might see an opportunity develop.
Even those with highly specialized educations, a number of times in their life, change careers, where their education is of no advantage, which is why I stress to young people to get as board an education as possible because that will come in handy in those inevitable changes. It has been estimated that 90% of any job tasks can be learned just as effectively on-the-job without a specialized education. Seeing the routine nature of most tasks, I am sure that is true. Of the remaining 10%, half is aided by education and the remaining 1/2 is beyond the capabilities of the person regardless. In repair shops it usually results in the very common advice that the unit is not worth repairing. I see that so often when techs get in over their level of competency. There are millions of perfectly repairable units sitting in garages or closets where the owner took the incorrect but expedient advice of a less than full competent tech. The same goes in every field I have ever witnessed up close from medicine to engineering. If society needed more than a couple percent of citizens to be competent, civilizations would fail regularly.

[Jazz P Bass]

Definitely.
And even more vacancies for salesmen than for Enginers of any kind
Even in China they are now having this problem where they have "too many" Engineers and "not enough" Factory workers.
In CHINA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/bu...anted=all&_r=0

But here we are answering the OP who stated that *he* wants to "get into pedal/amp design"

By the way, I did exactly the same ..... but I had to grow my own Factory, Brand, Market, etc.
Not many ads in the Newspapers (as in=Zero/none/zilch) asking for somebody with my skills.

Did you see what that guy majored in?
"Mr. Wang has a three-year associate degree in the design of offices and trade show booths"
What a skill set he must have.

[J M Fahey]

Yes, that perticular guy did *really* narrow his career opportunities.
Even so, I bet he has about 1000 times more job opportunities than a "pedal/tube amp designer".
As in: take *any" mid sized USA (just to name a Country, may be anywhere) city, say, from 80000 to 250000 people.
Are there offices being built and furnished there?
You bet.
Are there a couple companies or at least furniture/decoration shops catering to them?
I would be very surprised if you could find none.
Could they hire somebody with Mr Wang skills?
Why not?
Somebody has to do it .
Multiply this by the thousands of cities within the size I mentioned.
Thousands of potential Job opportunities.

Now repeat the exact same exercise, same cities, everything, but substitute "pedal/tube amp factory".
Unless the city is Petaluma, California ; Meridian, Mississippi , or a couple others (I'd say they can be counted with the fingers of one hand) , I guess getting a job opportunities would definitely look grim.
Oh well.

[Enzo]

Ahem, I did some time in trade show booths myself. I was the technical rep for a small manufacturer, and was involved in design of the booth and presentation.

Did it get me anywhere? No., but i did it.

[Jazz P Bass]

The major that the genleman elected took me as strange.
Replies that have been posted since my snide remark make sense.
Thinking back to when companies that I worked for had a Trade Booth designed, whooee, it was not cheap.