equipment building

Hi, I would be happy to help give some pointers get you started on the path.. I'm in southampton tho so you would have to be prepared to travel..

OK  I'm completely self taught.. had nobody to show me the ropes.. had to keep reading and learning and trying and getting it wrong before I got anywhere. Now I'm at the stage I built my pre etc and run my sound with it. I can help you by explaining and showing you the basics, I can also show you which books to buy. 

Pre amp looks very nice how long did it take you to build?

And you're good if you taught yourself well done


I know it can be a brain muffler at times but that's what trial and improvement is for

Cheers the preamp is unique.. took me about a year to work out all the parts and put it together, a few bits took more than one attempt (the mic pre took 3 complete redesigns before i was happy). The good thing is you can take a pre and break it down into basic blocks, mic pre, phono pre, line input, mixers, eq's etc etc its probably best to first begin to understand the basic building blocks

Hi, i would like to recomend craig Andrews books especially electronic projects for musicians.

Also Horowitz and Hill - Art of electronics. It's written in a way that avoids heavy maths for the most part and it tries to be practical.

Apart from that you are going to want a dual DC variable power supply, a multimeter, a prototyping breadboard, wires and wire strippers, plus components themselves. A decent second hand oscilloscope is quite cheap on ebay these days and also strongly recommended so you can really see what your kit is doing.

To get full results out of designing and building there is no escaping that you will need some maths. But you can skip a lot of that to get started and just start making bits. Start by building some op amp buffers and filters which are among the simplest of op-amp circuits and then you can move onto more complicated circuits. As was said you can connect op amp circuits together in functional blocks. There are some pitfalls to watch out for but in general it will just work. I would recommend starting with FET input op amps such as the TL072 to get started with because they are often a lot more forgiving in terms if biasing than the classic bipolar input 5532 which draw higher currents and can lead to annoying DC offsets when chaining some circuits together.

I can't offer much in the way of practical help but feel free to PM or email me and ask questions.

You may also want to have a look and see if you have a local hackerspace/makerspace near you. There will be people there who can offer advice from everything to making your circuits to getting them onto proper boards and then mounting them in an enclosure safely and without noise. (I still think this last part is actually the hardest part of building a good custom pre-amp).