designing effects

[mikehanna]

Newbie question...

I understand getting all of the EXACT answers to what I am asking would probably be too much for anyone to explain in a post, so if anyone can just gimme a pointer or three...or point me to a good source, that would help a lot.

Basically, im new at all this. I have a very basic understanding of all this stuff, I've been thru the FAQ and about 5 years ago, I spent a year learning the very basics of electronic circuitry and all I really know is how to solder, and the basic functions of the basic components such as resistors and capacitors, etc.

My question: there is so much on here about building perviously-designed stompboxes from schematics and stuff, but how could a person go about designing thier own effect from scratch? Like, how would a person say "I want to build a flange pedal with my OWN specifications" and know how to build it so that it is different than anything already being mass-produced?

[R.G.]

It's like how you get one of those perfect smooth green lawns that adorn English manor houses. You prepare the soil, plow it, level it, fertilize it, seed it, water it.

Then you roll it smooth for 200 years.

To do more than an easter-egging finding-your-own-beautiful-reality kind of design, you have to actually understand analog electronic design to at least some degree. That probably doesn't mean an EE degree, because EE degrees don't teach much of this any more.

But it does mean reading everything you can get your hands on about electronic design for several years, until you can picture what the electrons and fields are doing in your head, and probably that you can't sleep some nights for the pictures of circuits whirling around in front of your eyes. It means building ever-more-complicated stuff for years.

Education is **always** expensive, in either currency or time. Sometimes both.

There is no simple path to learning real design. Anyone who tells you there is is either naive or a liar.

[dpresley58]

Hi, and welcome!

I'm sure that eventually you -would- get exact answers to at least most of your questions here. We'll start with the "where to go" part of your post first.

There are many good articles on muzique.com on a variety of subjects that you might be interested in. Check that page's Lab Notebook. Another rather definitive source is geofex.com which has a section on "The Technology of the...<blank>" that goes into detail regarding the underpinnings of several different types of effects.

The articles on these two sites will give you enough to wrap your head around and to experiment with for some time to come. Who knows..? One or more of them might spark one of those light bulbs to come on..  :wink:

Also, there's a thread here recently regarding "must-have" books for this pursuit, both for the newbie and older hands. Might want to give it a look. I've picked up several books that were recommended there and haven't regretted doing so.

I really don't know of any one road that would get you "there". Just read as much as you can find. Before you know it, things start falling into place.

Best of luck and enjoy the journey.

[Bill Bergman]

First, you need to learn/understand what goes on in between the input and output of the device. To take the input and pass it thru the different components that cause distortion,modulation,amplification,....etc. When and if you can learn what componets, when combined, cause the different effect you can tweak the values to tweak or vary the circuit. You could combine different known circuit into a new one......and this is just the eazy way.
Guys like R.G., Mark Hammer and the may other electronic whizzes around here(sorry it would take to long to name them all) can't design stuff using actually electronic therory...the physics and mathematics.


Ps...Mikehanna, I'm in the same boat ....I don't know zip.

[gez]

Go along to your local library, have a look at the electronics section and read as much as possible.  Just learning how basic transistors work will get you a long way to understanding more complicated circuits.  

Read magazine articles, project books, the websites mentioned.

Buy a breadboard.  Breadboard tons of circuits and try to understand (through reading and tweaking) how they work.  

It's a bit like learning an instrument, you learn a few licks, then a few more and with time it all gets assimilates into what ends up as 'your style'.  After a while you come up with your own ideas.  If you're lucky (and practice hard) you become a jazz head and ideas stream.  If you're unlucky, you take up 'free jazz' and electrocute yourself.  Hmmm, I've lost the plot again...

[Mark Hammer]

I would never place myself in the same league as "Commander Keen".  We share the same human morphological features, are both pretty decent fellows, and share a love of music gear and a common sense of humour, but after that the men and the boys separate and he's definitely the man of us two.

That being said, I tend to get *placed* in the same category despite not deserving it, and the interesting question this provokes is "How?".  The answer to that question will be useful in addressing your question, I think.  I have absolutely NO formal training in electronics or engineering, don't work in the area, don't *really* understand Ohm's law, don't work in a music store (I'm a government research analyst), don't gig, and in fact don't really do much of anything you'd expect to be related to this domain.  What I do do is try my damnedest to understand how things work and what happens to *sound*.  I stare and stare and stare at the thousands of schematics this marvelous community has allowed me to amass, listen to the audible outcomes of circuit differences (and, despite their shortcomings, posted sound samples are quite helpful), and think long and hard about how it all fits together.

Certainly, one part of the effects puzzle and being able to "design" (and boy oh boy THERE is a word whose definition is used loosely sometimes) is grasping the pure technicalities of circuit elements.  But another vital part of what one might call design is thinking in terms of possibilities.  In other words, if it were possible to do THIS to the signal, what else could I do with ease?  Alternatively, now that I find myself in THIS situation with respect to the signal, what else can I do, or how do I get myself out of it with the least difficulty?  And, as RG and many others can attest, sometimes you just find yourself in the middle of a happy accident.  The history of effects is chalk full of them.  I'm sure the first person to ever do hub-flanging had no idea that accidentally slowing a tape reel with their thumb was going to sound so cool.  More recently, people have come up with new things simply by stumbling onto datasheets for components and recognizing that the component could be used in interesting ways.  If memory serves, the Z-Vex Nanohead and Imp both arose partly out of Zach stumbling onto these teeny tubes.  One effect someone else came up with (the Vanishing Point) came out of someone stumbling onto a simple LED-meter chip.  It goes on and on.

Personally, I find that the more one knows about what effects are out there, and how they differ or are similar, it really helps to assist one's thinking.  You can start to think about what has and hasn't been done, or what has and hasn't been done in combination.  Of course, there are two forks in the road when it comes to what you might call "design"; one is to do the familiar, except either better, or more efficiently, or with greater potential for control, or more tailored to some need, and the other is to do something different.  Looking at what others have already done aids in both missions I think.

The circuit walk-throughs that accompanied many of the DIY books and the construction articles during the "golden era" of analog electronics hobby mags (such mags and project articles are still out there but they are quite rare these days) were extremely helpful in terms of grasping the building blocks of effects, and learning what blocks bought you what possibilities.  Though it rarely gets mentioned here, Craig Anderton had a terrific book out in the 80's called "Guitar Gadgets".  It had no schematis, but it had some very nice block diagrams of individual *categories* of effects, outlining what sorts of controls one might expect to find in that category (and pictured examples of commercial products) and what the control "did" at a conceptual level.  Very helpful for organizing thinking, and provoking ideas about what effects at that time *didn't* do but *might*.  And that's pretty much been my role here; not any sort of "designer" but more of a provocateur, suggesting what something *could* do.  Personally, I stand in awe of those folks who can make transistors do what they want, and produce fuzzes with totally different personalities.  Just as I'm sure sometimes I make them scratch their heads and mutter "Well, the technical details need to be worked out, but where the hell does he come up with this stuff?".  Fortunately, we have a big soup tureen of ideas here where all of these competencies mix together and good stuff comes out.  Watch it all swirling, pay close attention, and you will most assuredly come out of it with something that makes you proud.

Anyways, somebody else's turn here.

[Bill Bergman]

Think that should just about wrap it up, don't you?

[Doug_H]

I would never place myself in the same league as "Commander Keen".  We share the same human morphological features, are both pretty decent fellows, and share a love of music gear and a common sense of humour, but after that the men and the boys separate and he's definitely the man of us two.

Oh come on Mark... I can see you splitting atoms in the lab right now, developing a new semiconductor material to fabricate an IC to build the ultimate tube screamer...

Sorry, it was just a funny image I had in my head... :lol:  :lol:

I have nothing to add other than learn all you can. Even the "experts" here are still on the learning curve. If they weren't, they would get bored in a hurry, dropping from the forum and taking up new hobbies like skydiving or growing orchids. Get used to and comfortable with being on the learning curve- all the time. Sometimes you may feel like you do when you are leaning back in your chair, right before you fall. That's okay, it's normal.  You will learn to like that sensation.  Don't be afraid to put in some effort and it will pay off. After all, that's really what it's all about. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking this is about designing pedals. When you peel away all the layers of crap, the thing that keeps it all going and keeps it interesting is the learning that takes place.

Doug

[Steben]

an IC to build the ultimate tube screamer...

And even a tube screamer gets its tone mostly from the diodes... The IC never clips.[/quote]

[gez]

Even the "experts" here are still on the learning curve. If they weren't, they would get bored in a hurry, dropping from the forum and taking up new hobbies like skydiving or growing orchids.

Although I design my own stuff, I consider myself a neophyte compared to many on this forum!  I definitely don't consider myself an expert either, but the day I get bored of learning is the day I take up...er, crochet (scared of heights and orchids make me sneeze)!  

[aron]

I think that's what keeps us together. The constant learning; even from beginners we learn.

That and the "immortally" crappy amp that never works right too! :twisted:

[Mark Hammer]

Like, how would a person say "I want to build a flange pedal with my OWN specifications" and know how to build it so that it is different than anything already being mass-produced?

I blathered on but never really answered your question, did I?  Okay, I'll try and answer it, using your sample item.

1)  Learn how the pedal in question "works" in a general sense.  That is, how it does what it does to be that kind of effect.  So, for a flanger, you'd need to learn about delay chips and their problems/operating-conditions, the properties of "sweeping" and how it relates to LFO design/characteristics, how time relates to sound characteristics.

2) Learn how the different segments of the typical circuit produce the aspects of how it "works".

3) Get hold of lots of commercial and DIY schematics for that kind of effect and look for what's in common, and what's different, making sure to circle (physically or mentally) the different building blocks.  A nice example might be the A/DA flanger, where you might notice that there is a bit of filtering after the delay chip, but even more filtering in the feedback path.  Here we have something familiar and typical, but something a little different as well.  Tuck facts like that in the back of your mind.

4) Listen to both examples of, and comments about, existing pedals of that category, making note of what sounds different (or is described as such) and what is *physically* different in the way of either devices used, control features offered, circuit complexity, and so on.

5) Think about what you liked and didn't like.  Think about what the effect could be made to do by changes in certain of those building blocks.

6) Figure out how to make those changes to the building block/s of relevance.

7) Tweak and listen.  Repeat.  (If you're up for more than two days in a row, you may want to lather and rinse...and repeat...also)

In principle, it's really no different than knowing enough about the principles of football to be able to watch a play and identify the things that made it work as well as it did, and then think about what you might want to do differently next time.

"VSAT" recently directed our collective attention to a very nice site for viewing patent documents ( http://www.pat2pdf.org ), and others (Ton Barmentloo most frequently) have contributed patent numbers of interesting products.  There are some really nice patent applications that form the basis of some terrific tutorials, and you are encouraged to look at them.  Rather than hastily written up blurbs, these circuit walk-throughs are meticulously crafted, and though it may not be the language WE would use, it is nonethless very clear and often well illustrated with schematics and helpful block diagrams.  This particular thread ( http://www.diystompboxes.com/sboxforum/viewtopic.php?t=34208 ) is a nice place to start.

[mojotron]

Well... although I chime in where I can.. I'm not that big of a contributor to the forum; although there are a few of my pedals out there; you would be hard pressed to find mojotronics pedals outside of the Seattle area. But, here's my thoughts.

I can tell you from personal experience that an EE degree and working related fields does not make a person a good effect designer. At one point I could formulate ohms law from maxwell's equations, but I was worthless at building good circuits until I got some practice doing it. I think a person needs 2 things, and to develop 3 things to design circuits that sound the way you want them to.

You Need:
1) The capacity to learn and to ask questions - requiring an open mind, time, patience, respect for others

2) A love for stomp boxes - requiring the ability to develop a sort of "tunnel vision" when you need to make a dedicated effort to solve a problem. I think designing and building these things takes a lot of time and dedication too.

You Need To Develop:
1) An Understanding of Electronics - you basically have to learn all you need/want to know... but you should not have to rely on other's knowledge too much. Some people don't want to know anything, and just leverage the work of others. I tend to dive into the science of how something works rather then focusing on being creative and actually finishing the design to concept. There's a sweet spot in the middle of those 2 extremes.

2) An Understanding of Related Work - everything I have liked that I designed came from building something related to that, and understanding how I wanted to make a device that "did this instead of that". In short you have to develop a concept first, then design. Sometimes I hear a sound - like that 1st tune off of Eric Johnson's first album - I guess it's "Bloom" - and you think "I could do that if I built a circuit that did this" and that comes form building, reading and understanding what each part does in the related circuit, tweaking, perfecting everything you think is relevent that is related (which by the way I can get close to that sound if I put a FF in front - turned way down - of a JFET circuit that is kind of like Q2 on the FF - cranked - with a 1uF source bypass cap, that goes into a few more J201's configured kind of like the 2nd and 3rd stage in the BSIAB, and has a Ge/1n4001 diode pair in a shunt config preceeding the tone control with a saturation control kind of like a Distortion Pro) Then, you are ready to make a similar thing. Another great way to build something that does what you hear in your head is to put parts of designs together. (like I mentioned above) like putting a fetzer valve onto the 1st stage of a tubesreamer driving a fender tone stack, that might sound sweat too. There's a progression from concept->design->improvement; if you have a great concept, the design is the easy part IMHO.

3) I would say that you have to develop the ability to help others as well. If you look at the people that replied to this thread, you would see that some of most prolific designers are also the first to help others.

[Gus]

The question is a very good one.  Time and education are a big part of it.   I was told as a kid that an education is not cheap(money and time) kind of like R.G.s post.

 Its hard to do something new with effects.  About the closest I have got is the NPN boost.  Bootstrappping and gain adjust via the emitter R are not new: However together in a boost petal powered by 9 volts was something I have not seen in other petals.  Now people here have noted that one of the resistors is lower in value than would be expected( it sounded better to me).  Its a different flavor of a boost and easy to build.

 Build stuff.  Note the sound, keep good notes, find something you like read and ask and test it.

 For me building stuff works two ways, build from theory,  try to understand why something has a "sound" by understanding the theory.  I am a person that thinks there is science to the sound sometimes you just need to find it.

[zachary vex]

if you do reach a level of proficiency high enough to design your own flanger, you can be relatively sure that if you design it from scratch it will be different (and sound somewhat different) from most other designs out there.  it's difficult to accidentally design a complex circuit exactly the same as someone else's!

[jmusser]

Since I see Gus post so infrequently, I just wanted to say thanks for the OUSB and SOU. Both are wonderful!