Leaning to design your own stompboxes?

[robbiemcm]

Can anyone point me to some good resources that explain circuits and how certain parts work. I really want to learn how to design my own circuits for stompboxes so I can get the sound out of it that I want. Copying other people is good, and I'll still have to continue for now, but I really want to go that one step further.

Thanks for all help,
Robbie

[ESPm2M]

just read as much as you can about electronics, the basics to start.

there isn't really any other way - no shortcuts

[zachary vex]

there are a series of little books by Forrest Mims at radio snack.  start there... you can skip the digital stuff if you want, but don't skip the discrete (non-IC) logic.  get yourself an experimenter's socket and after you understand a little bit about how basic booster and fuzz circuits work, start substituting in your own parts values and adding things to see if you can customize the devices for your own sound... you'll begin to understand how certain parts of the circuit affect the sound.  it's always nice to start somewhere... pick one of the circuits people have posted in here and noodle around with it to see if you can get anything interesting to happen.  that's your shortcut... do your own sort of circuit-bending.  if you want to catch up to the people who have designed those circuits, in most cases, you have a lot of years of futzing around and studying to do!  i started making circuits in 2nd grade.  i read every electronics book in my elementary school library. lucky for me, there were a pile of them in there that someone had contributed.  i couldn't understand them, but i absorbed stuff anyway, and years later it started to make more sense.  but honestly, it does take years to get a feel for it.  i've been at it for 37 years, and i'll be the first to admit i'm still a terrible hack who has only achieved moderate success by sheer persistence and religious research.  research for me is looking at every old obscure schematic i can get my hands on and usually scratching my head going "what the ^$&% does that part of the circuit do???"  

you have to develop some kind of schematic language skills, and you can only do that by immersion.  you need to be so comfortable with basic circuit components and the basic reason for their placement in different parts of basic circuits that you can race through a schematic and look for the really odd stuff... that's where the fun is.  8^)  it will require building a lot of basic circuits up and goofing around, as well as studying books and schematics every spare moment!

good luck!

[robbiemcm]

Bah... being in my final two years of school I don't think I'll be able to do a huge amount of research, but I'll keep it as a hobby for now. I want to be either an electrical or electronic engineer when I grow up (that's what I think at the moment) so hopefully I'll pick up some good stuff there. I guess I have many years ahead of me. We don't have "radio shacks" (or snacks) here, closest thing is Dick Smith, but only books I know they sell are little kiddy follow this book to build a pre-packaged circuit with pcb and all. I'll have to look out for something better, maybe go off to the library for once... scary thought.

Thanks for all the help though, it has been extremely useful