felixvaughn wrote:I really want to build 2 or 3 pedals to sell, to fund buying parts to make more pedals.
I have researched pedal building for ages now and i am ready to get stuck in with a soldering iron and get to work, but I only have a horrible amp (fender frontman 15 with a torn speaker) to test my builds on.
I’m worried that if I get a circuit sounding good through my amp, it won’t sound good through the person who buys the pedal’s amp.
I don’t know anyone with a guitar amp or have a music store near me. I cannot afford to buy a new amp. I intend on replacing the speaker on my current one with pedal profit money.
I’m not a gear fetishizer, my amp really does sound awful. What advice do the pedal builders of osg have for me? Am I worrying too much?
Is this our very first build? I'd firstly say, that perhaps the first three by sod's law will usually need loads of debugging, and to probably build them for yourself rather than keeping up too much hope to get much more than the cost of parts back...
It depends what the pedal does really. Listening to it DI through headphones is usually a good test for levels of noise, and if its something that really warps the guitar's signal is pretty good indication of how the pedal will actually sound. You can sometimes expect e.g. an AC30 to take it differently, but then they aren't good at taking pedals, and i'd only worry about that if it were a specialist pedal. However amps will have different impedances so you can expect some changes with a fuzz, but probably not many other types of pedals. It might be possible to simulate EQ of amps with an amp-sim, from a bunch of free plugins, although this may or may not be sufficient if impedances change things, and certainly no-one yet claims are near the real deal...it just gives you a different tonality to run it through.
On the other hand, milder effects, especially ones that interact with an amp, I'd think it would be quite important. Anything like a preamp, boost or overdrive, and some fuzzes are interacting quite strongly.... If you want to put it through the full testing I'd say yes, try it with various amps, and even in a band situation perhaps too, as well as some super-clean DI stuff. Or at least one functioning guitar amp, depends how serious you want it to be.