Stupid Basic Question

[Agemay]

No doubt this is going to seem childish in it's academic merits but I'm at total level 1 with this game.

Imagine I bought a little enclosure,a totally blank board,an in/output,battery parts and a switch.

Now,if I grabbed a few resistors (say 5-7) and soldered them onto the board along with the power supply,
input,output and switch would ANYTHING at all happen?
I mean, would any effect occur,despite the inabilty to control it without any pots?

[pjwhite]

It depends on how they are connected.  It's kind of like asking if you would end up with a story if you made some random scribbles on a piece of paper.

[stringsthings]

No doubt this is going to seem childish in it's academic merits but I'm at total level 1 with this game.

Imagine I bought a little enclosure,a totally blank board,an in/output,battery parts and a switch.

Now,if I grabbed a few resistors (say 5-7) and soldered them onto the board along with the power supply,
input,output and switch would ANYTHING at all happen?
I mean, would any effect occur,despite the inabilty to control it without any pots?

it depends upon your definition of "ANYTHING"

[frequencycentral]

[CynicalMan]

If you want to start building effects, that's probably not the best way to do it. You'll have spent 30 or 40 dollars and you'll only get a bit of soldering practice. I suggest starting out with the Beginner Project. Alternatively, get a kit from BYOC or a similar site

[alparent]

If your asking is an effect can by build using no pots.......yes.
If your asking is an effect can by build using only resistors again.......yes.....but why?

Pots are simply variable resistors. You could substitute any pots in a schematic with a resistor.
What values to use is up to you. Experiment and put in the values you like.

They are very simple schematics that you could play with.
If you have a breadboard, it's even easeyer...
A simple perf board can aslo be used.

[JKowalski]

Passive components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) can not provide gain. That means that you cannot make oscillators, amplifiers, etc using them only. The most you can do with passive components is to make volume controls (attenuating ONLY) or filters (attenuating only, no "treble boost" for example, only "treble cuts"). This also means that a battery + only passive components is useless, you never need a battery if you only use passive components. You only need a power source if you are providing gain/amplification.... Because you are making the signal more powerful and power has to come from somewhere!

With only resistors, you can't even make filters. Capacitors and inductors are frequency dependent, which gives you the ability to make filters (effective resistance changes with frequency). But resistors are not, they have a fixed resistance so the most that they an do is "resist" the signal, or make a voltage divider which attenuates the signal.

Doing what you suggest would have one or more of these not so great outcomes

A. Short your power supply with too little resistance, draining the battery in no time at all and probably burning some resistors
B. Put a large DC voltage on your pedal's output, which is a no-no (you want your signal to wiggle around 0V or ground, you typically accomplish this by using a capacitor which blocks all DC voltage and only lets the wiggle through)
C. Make your guitar signal pointlessly quiet
D. Raise the signal impedance so high that your guitar becomes pointlessly quiet whenever you plug into certain things.

There basically is not any good outcome unless you want your signal quieter.



I'm sorry but electronics is not a spend a day learning and become a master type of thing. This is something you typically have to spend a good portion of your college schedule studying. You really have to do your "homework" to get familiar with it. If you want to design your own effects the best advice I can give is to start building other effects from schematics online, and complementing it with some heavy reading making sure you know how the effect you are building is working. Once you think you know an effect pretty well, maybe start tweaking it. Once you get some success in tweaking, maybe try a more complicated schematic. Tweak, tweak, read, read, up a level... And then start experimenting with your own creations. Make no mistake, the road to building your own effects is a long one.

[Agemay]

Thank you for all the replies,both in-depth and straight.

I did not mean to insult anyone by suggesting that building is so easy all you have
to do is throw components down and it builds itself.I appreciate those that create their
own sounds in the most crude manner by hacking away at old pedals, but also those that
spend immense amounts of time designing pedals that border on synthesizers due to their
complexity.

Essentially all I wanted to know was if such a crude device would work and what functionality
it would serve.I feel this has been answered for me in a myriad of ways,cheers.

[MikeH]

Hi and welcome to the forum; you're in the right place and you have the right attitude, now you just need a little know-how.

As far as your original q goes-  If you only used resistors and had it hooked up to a power supply you'd actually end up putting DC power on both the input and output of the "device", which in addition to not doing much effect wise, could also be bad for anything else in your signal chain.  So- don't try it! 

Instead of starting out by drawing random squiggles, I'd suggest a "paint-by-numbers" approach.  There are many kits available with good instructions that are actually quite easy to assemble.  For instance, check out generalguitargadgets.com, they have some good kits there.  After you build it and get it working, then you can turn to the "Ok- let's understand exactly how this thing is working" phase of things. 

Good luck.

[JKowalski]

I did not mean to insult anyone by suggesting that building is so easy all you have
to do is throw components down and it builds itself.I appreciate those that create their
own sounds in the most crude manner by hacking away at old pedals, but also those that
spend immense amounts of time designing pedals that border on synthesizers due to their
complexity.

Likewise... I did not mean to appear insulted! Just wanted to make it clear that you have to be somewhat committed to learning to reach that goal of designing. 

And yes, welcome to the forum!

[frank_p]

No doubt this is going to seem childish in it's academic merits but I'm at total level 1 with this game.

Imagine I bought a little enclosure,a totally blank board,an in/output,battery parts and a switch.

Now,if I grabbed a few resistors (say 5-7) and soldered them onto the board along with the power supply,
input,output and switch would ANYTHING at all happen?
I mean, would any effect occur,despite the inabilty to control it without any pots?

If you want to acquire something about that forget about the box and the guitar.  Just resistors, a multimeter, a battery and a pencil.  Get also a beginner book and you'll probably find in it some theory about Kirchhoff's circuit laws and mesh analysis.  Usually in all schools they teach that at first.  Read voltages and currents where you want and try to figure out how it got like this by asking "Kirchhoff" (or how all the currents are distributed in the loops created by the resistors and battery).  You'll have to be able to do some basic algebra.

[stringsthings]

Passive components ... can not provide gain ...

Doing what you suggest would have one or more of these not so great outcomes ...

C. Make your guitar signal pointlessly quiet

there are ( of course ) top secret electronic supply houses near the North and South Pole that stock extremely rare aggressive components .... which ( of course ) will make your guitar signal pointlessly ridiculous !   

[deadastronaut]

get a breadboard..and mess with a simple pedal schematic...just a few bits n pieces...see how it works..

or why it isn't......its a great way to hear if you like it...or not....before you commit to building a complete pedal...

oh and welcome.

rob.

[Agemay]

Cheers guys,it's been frustrating in the past when I've tried to start on this hobby.
I freqeuntly find that those with the knowledge are unwilling to share since they feel
they can then hold that knowledge over me.

Hopefully it wont be too long untill I can understand you all and build a pretty basic
pedal e.g fuzz.