1970s tech? 60s???

[slashandburn]

I was just talking with a friend about my new hobby and when I mentioned "integrated circuits" he asked it this was "digital" stuff. I laughed and said "nah, we're talking 1970s technology, man" and then realised actually i wasnt really sure, except that its definitely not digital.

So after a bit of research i find the first monolithic IC opamp appeared in the mid/late 60s, so 70s probably wasnt a bad guess, assuming it was a good few years before Ic opamps became commonplace.

If this question comes up again, it would be nice to know at least roughly what the right answer is. When did IC opamps in fx pedals/amps become commonplace? Ill hazard a guess that it wouldve been well into the 80's before the DIY community really starting getting their teeth into them. As i said though, vesides "theyre not digital" i dont really "When" people started really started experimenting at home with this stuff.

Id be grateful for any insight. I trust what I read here more than my own halfassed research that tend to rely heavily on wikipedia.  cheers in advance!

[G.Neyrey]

Craig Anderton's "Electronics Projects for Musicians" (first printing 1975) got a lot of folks started in DIY construction back in the mid-70's. I first built a preamp (741 op-amp) to install in my beloved Gibson SG.....to replace all those pesky LPB1's I kept breaking! His "Ultra Fuzz" (dual op-amp?), "Bass Fuzz" (741 op-amp) provided me with tons of fuzzy, pyscho, "Blue Cheer"goodness back then. An IC timer (555) metronome was also constructed to play along to, and to keep my noob guitar playing in time. The year was 1978.
   I suppose CA hit a nerve. A few years later, he updated the book with more circuits and improved on some of the original designs. This is the "EPFM" book that most are familiar with, and is still available today.

[anotherjim]

I didn't start tinkering until 1978 by which time Radio Shack (AKA Tandy) had IC's on sale in nice vacuum packs with an application sheet.
By that time the DIY electronics magazines were full of IC based projects (741 and 555 regularly showing then as now!). IC's were by no means new (DTL, a logic family, had already pretty much been and gone having been beaten out by TTL).

I don't think it was until the use of BBD's that FX manufacturers got into using chips. The Organ and Synth world were already into IC's as a very worthwhile saving over countless discrete transistors and diodes, but until Flanger and Chorus pedals, Fx pedals were mostly all discrete. The first "musical" thing I saw with IC's was a (cough) Bontempi electronic organ which had DTL dividers and an IC power amp in around 1975. It's Top octave was still generated by 12 individual transistor flip-flop oscillators though. About the same time I saw inside a then new HH IC100s guitar amp which used 741's op-amps.

[R.G.]

60s design in pedals was almost entirely discrete devices. A few DIY designs may have used ICs, but not many. Over the 70s, opamps and rarely CMOS was used in DIY pedals, although the commercial outfits were solidly into ICs.

Pedal DIY largely died out in the 1980s and up into the 1990s. The birth of the web and browsers was largely what enabled the very few pedal DIY people to make connections and cross-pollenate one another (... er, intellectually at least    ) and start the ongoing explosion that's been the last 15-18 years.

I remember the 1980s as a long, dark ages in pedal DIY. Anderton's stuff was about the only light back then.

[slashandburn]

Interesting stuff, thanks!

[Fender3D]

I was 12-13 when I started playing with electronic musical stuff (just after the toy-train period...)
Then '76-'77, and uA741 ( it was also the name of my band, back then...) was an expensive chip, at least here in Italy.
By '80-'81 I built my first high power amp, based on an ILP monolitic mosfet 60W power amp and a surplus power trafo.
At least, I could afford an all IC (741s) preamp for that, by playing guitar in my church...