roseblood11 wrote:I just think that no overdrive is worth 600 dollars. The idea to pay that amount of money just to find a slightly modified clone of a well-known pedal under the goop sounds very odd to me. Raising the mony, retracing etc takes some time, and this time could be spend much better by learning how to build your own circuit. And that`s what freestompboxes and diystompboxes are about, at least in my opinion: Not just cloning, but learning from existing circuits to build better ones, or to modify them to suit my personal taste
You couldn't have said it better.
Even if someone has no desire to build something, at least they can get a fundamental idea of what gives it the characteristics that it has. It's kind of interesting that some guys can give you details all day long about what's in their sports car - type of engine, type of aspiration, tires, shocks, exhaust - and what makes for one type of performance car to have the appealing characteristics that it does. Or motorcycles. And plenty of other hobbies. Or with guitars, you can kind of see what's going on, even if you don't quite know how a pickup is wound, what is involved with a neck tenon, just exactly how it is that a tremolo functions, and so on.
Just learning the fundamentals can go a long way - just learning the difference between a drive box with FET's vs. one with op amps, for example.
Tracing and replicating is just droll, I think. Tracing to learn a thing or two is a different story, but how often does that happen? Or you replicate it and it doesn't sound like what you thought it would. So now you have a dilemma - do you bail on it, or do you try to learn enough more to alter it to sound good in spite of that?