After all these years...

[ppatchmods]

James 5:16 says, "Confess your faults one to another...", so lets have it! For the sake of the self-esteem of all of us "noobies" and "up & comers" let us all confess our secret faults by finishing this statement:

After all these years, I still have trouble with_______________________________________.

"After all these years I still have trouble with soldering pots and troubleshooting.

There! That wasn't so bad...I feel a lot better about it! 

The people of this forum have helped me out of some tight jams in the past, and the wisdom found here is invaluable for d.i.y.ers! I just wanted to say thanks and offer some extra encouragement. Thanks

[Mark Hammer]

Well, you know something buddy?  Even the Queen and the Pope and the President accidentally poke their fingernail through the toilet paper once in a while.

I think the only people who have no trouble with assembly are the people who make the same pedal many times a day, 5 days a week, year in year out.  Most of us here have the disadvantage of building any given pedal ONCE and then moving on to something else.  I may give the impression of being a whiz now and then, but I can assure you that anything I am building for the first time will be butt-ugly, chock full of errors, and be less than I hoped for, no matter how good it might sound....when I jiggle the wires just right.   The second or third build, things start to come around very nicely.

[BDuguay]

Okay, my turn.....
"After all these years, I still have trouble with wrapping my head around this whole impedance thing"
There, I feel better. I'm still no more educated but I feel a sense of peace now.....
B.

[ayayay!]

I may give the impression of being a whiz now and then, but I can assure you that anything I am building for the first time will be butt-ugly, chock full of errors, and be less than I hoped for, no matter how good it might sound

Man no joke!  I almost dread my first builds sometimes because I know they will be "throwaways" since they rarely come out sounding like I wanted.   Meaning I build it, then modify the crap out of it, then it's such a mess I don't want it on my board and I want to now build the "right" one.

Anyway, my fault would be transistors and opamps.  I know what they do in a given circuit, but not much past that.  When I want to know what it will do, if I swap this one for that one, I want to know what to look for in the datasheet.   

[GREEN FUZ]

Well, you know something buddy?  Even the Queen and the Pope and the President accidentally poke their fingernail through the toilet paper once in a while. ..

Nah! I`m pretty sure the Queen has someone do it for her. 

[jacobyjd]

I don't have fingernails   

[frequencycentral]

After all these years........I still feel I know next to nothing about electronics - I'm a monkey with a machine gun!

[JasonG]

I'm a monkey with a machine gun!

lol what a great mental picture.
  Power supply's bum me out. Hearing an amp pop when I turn it on is right up there with the ping you hear when you break a string as your first tuning it up. I hate it! I have learned a lot but I am still not where I want to be.
   

[GREEN FUZ]

I'm a monkey with a machine gun!

[frequencycentral]

I'm a monkey with a machine gun!

Hey! Damn paparazzi! Where did you get that photo of me from ?? I won't have my image being posted of forums without written permission !!!! 

..................that day was a 'bad hair day' for me too.............

[tiges_ tendres]

Well, you know something buddy?  Even the Queen and the Pope and the President accidentally poke their fingernail through the toilet paper once in a while. ..

Nah! I`m pretty sure the Queen has someone do it for her. 

Correct!  and I dont think she uses toilet paper, I think she uses a swan or similar majestic water fowl.

[Steben]

After all these years... my biggest problem is still patience. I hate it to wire those passive things that do nothing but lighting it up, switching and letting signal in.

[frequencycentral]

James 5:16 says, "Confess your faults one to another...",

John 5 says, "There will be intense guitar shredding....", http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/online_downloads/john_5_talks_gear_with_guitar_world.html

[Ben N]

Well, you know something buddy?  Even the Queen and the Pope and the President accidentally poke their fingernail through the toilet paper once in a while.

I can't speak to the Queen or the Pope, but as for the President, he is in such deep doodoo right now that I don't think he'd notice!

[Boogdish]

After all these 10 months since I did my first build, I still have trouble remembering the stuff I learned in physics class years ago that pertains to electronics.   I guess back then  I was thinking "when am I ever gonna need to know how to calculate the current at a given point in a circuit, I'M GONNA BE A FAMOUS MUSICIAN!!!"

[Mark Hammer]

My confessions...

I still get the orientation of things mixed up and omit ground connections when flipping perfed circuits back and forth...regularly.

I end up with a small mountain of unfinished projects because the "next one" always looks like it could be easily finished in one evening.....and generally isn't.  Note to self: Etched and stuffed boards are not pedals; they are simply circuit boards.  To be a pedal, they must have connections to the outside world, pots, switches, and power.

I still don't "get" how to identify the input and output impedance of things.  I only know what is better and worse.

I haven't played through anything considered to have "gigworthy" power or speaker complement in decades.  Any drummer could drown me out in an eyeblink.  My tweed Bassman has sat in a nonfunctional state for about 5 years.

With the exception of the ones that were in the first chord book I bought for $0.59 when I started out in the 60's, I don't know the names of most of the chords I can play.

I know Ohm's law has an I, and R, and a C in it....I think...but that's as far as it goes.

I'm so cheap I use "component roaches" - cannibalized resistors/caps whose leads have been trimmed until there is precious little lead left, and occasionally barely enough to make it to the other side of the PCB.  I still have components I bought in 1973 and have re-used or never found a use for yet but I'll be damned if I throw them out (anyone need a 50k pot with an on-off AND push/pull switch and a nonstandard-size shaft? Howzabout a quad-ganged 50k pot?).

[dschwartz]

after all this years (like 2 and a half) ..i still don´t know or i´m too lazy to figure out how to wire pots...ussually end up with reversed controls (except for volume and gain)..

i used to build fx to improve my sound..now i build them just for the fun of it and barely play my guitar once in a while...

[earthtonesaudio]

...I still don't get diodes.  I know there's a p-type material and an n-type material, but I can never remember cathode vs anode, or pnp vs npn...


...Actually as I was writing this I think I finally figured it out.

Alright, after all these years, I still suck at letting something leave the "breadboard stage."

[sean k]

... I'm really glad I took a coupla years off and didn't go near anything remotely electronic... well I did but only in passing.

I've done it before with other things I'm into and it really is a good thing to do. I had stopped in '05 at a point where I was making stomps to sell and realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do. Number one I didn't really know bugger all about electronic theory and two... it just wasn't my idea of fun.

So after all these years... away from this stuff I'm back and it seems that in the interim my brain has figured out quite a bit of this stuff and I've also developed a genuine interest in how things actually work. I've even started breadboarding.

...after all these years... my favourite part is still taking a schematic and drawing out a PCB and the least favourite part is etching, sitting over the stove with my finger tips getting hotter and hotter, though a just etched board, out of the bath, with hardly any of what I want eaten away because the sharpies wouldn't cling, is even more enjoyable than drawing up the design.

[arma61]

After all these years... I still  try to troubleshoot circuit (for hours!!!!) with

- power supply unit off!
- guitar cable not connected
- guitar volume turned to 0
- IC/trannies not in place

(among many other things...... the worse one... put my drill template upsidedown, so to make the drilled enclosure completely useless)

cheers