i was windering if anyone could help me to understand how pedals work, because i want to know how to build them but understanding how they work would prob be important. and of anyone could explain or point me to somewhere that explains how to build the circuitboard and all those tings. i understand electricy and circuits and what not. just not the in depth stuff with buildng urself something like a pedal. also does anyone know how a tuner works and how they go about decding what ur tuning is i really appreciate any help.

check out diystompboxes.com - look especially at the WIKI part of the site, lots and lots of info on the hows and whys. Just gotta dig a little.

This may be too basic for you. But building a BYOC kit does not directly teach you the concepts, but just the act of building a pedal from a kit will improve your understanding, because we learn a lot through our hands and just messing around with something will give you more insight.

How much experience would you need to build a BYOC kit? Are the instructions basically enough as long as you know how to solder properly? I've been eyeing the new digital delay, but I REALLY don't want to fuck it up.

My buddy said he'll help me out because he's done a few before, and because I want expression outs hooked up to rate and time (which he has also done), but I want to be able to at least contribute. Otherwise I might as well have someone build it for me, and that just defeats the purpose.

Yes, diystompboxes.com is the place to go if you want to get started in building pedals yourself. I've been building pedals for a few years now, and that site has been an essential resource for information. Also, there are a lot of circuit schematics posted there, even some good ones for beginners.

Each effect type is a lesson in itself, so there's a lot to learn. Overdrive and distortion circuits can be pretty basic and are generally the easiest to understand (although some are pretty complex). Most of them involve passing your signal through a series amplifying stages that cause the signal to become clipped in some way. They also usually have some sort of filtering for tone shaping (treble, bass controls).

Modulation effects (chorus, phasers, flangers) are usually based around chips, so they're not as easy to understand. Same with digital effects--mostly you're just routing the guitar signal in and out of chips. These can actually be relatively easy to build, but not very satisfying if you want to understand what they're doing.

Booster pedals are some of the easiest circuits to build and a great place to begin.

Brian Wampler makes some great effects for Brent Mason, and others. He also has a book that shows how to build pedals. Here's a link:



http://www.indyguitarist.com/

JazzHessian, you just need to know how to solder. It's basic enough.