Breadboard changing output? Huh?!?!?!

[phector2004]

Hey everyone,

Breadboarded another fuzz face yesterday to test some transistors in, and I accidentally dropped a pillow on my breadboard.
Despite my hardest efforts to keep it neat, it still had a small amount of green "spaghetti wiring" and the pillow knocked out a wire between my 10k trimpot and 8.2k resistor... in any case, I tried putting it together in various ways, cause I wasn't sure if I had made a mistake initially before messing up the wiring  I ended up with a strange result...

The sound that I had tweaked to "just right" had a combined resistance of 17.07K
Bypassing the trim gave me 8.02K and a very muddy sound
here's the strange bit:

Moving the 8.02K resistor from (G64, G61) to (F64, F61) to keep it from shorting on the trimpot legs changed the sound of the circuit 
I yanked it out, moved it up, plugged it in, strummed, rinsed, repeated about 5 or 6 times and it kept doing the same thing... sounds noticeably more bassy/less treble when I switch it to the F's, and its driving me nuts...

Should it be changing anything at all?
I'm getting the exact same resistance in either case, and it doesn't make sense to me.

Would the added few pFs or so of capacitance be a possible culprit?

I might just get someone to switch it for me at random to make sure I'm not biased. I'm hoping its just my imagination, but if component placement can have such an effect, I might just have to buy RG's book...

[Krallum]

Id like to know more about the pillow section of this tale


Id check for broken leads on things, if you know the hfe of the transistors you had try to replace with similar

Breadboards do have internal resistances and capacitances so that might be an issue

Other than that no idea

[phector2004]

Id like to know more about the pillow section of this tale


Id check for broken leads on things, if you know the hfe of the transistors you had try to replace with similar

Breadboards do have internal resistances and capacitances so that might be an issue

Other than that no idea

A couch pillow fell on my breadboard on the floor...
Unless you want the real story, involving strippers, whiskey, and loud music   


I've given up worrying about component placement so much and disassembled it to perfboard the sucker. I'm sure it'll sound just fine.
Doubt it was capacitance as the distance between 4 columns is pretty big... C = ε₀ A/d, or about 8.9x10^-12F/m(0.0001m²/0.01m) = 8.9x10^-14F or 89fF

I think it was ultimately corrosion from never having used that part of the board or maybe that glue from the tape on resistor packaging strips was the culprit. Might have to check the resistance of those specific holes again...