Hi,
in this post, I will not talk about any electronic or guitar project, but I want to say something about the necessity to learn basic electronic principles, if you are new to electronics.
But first something about me. My only electronics background comes from a physics class in high school, where we learned basic principles like Ohm's law and so on. I always messed around with soldering iron and other tools as a kid, so I'm quite capable of putting some stuff together. But do I really know how it works? Or why it doesn't? Well ... no.
There really are so many schematics on the internet which are more or less tested and you can build them with absolutely no experience whatsoever. You can build amazing guitar effects with absolutely no idea what an op-amp is, or how a tube works. Just build a circuit you find and hope it works (or you can even buy some kits, which I really don't like to be honest)
But I always wanted to build some guitar effects and really understand them, to be able to hear a sound and say "ah! bigger capacitor there and a smaller resistor here" to make the exact sound that I wanted. Or understand the limitations of certain circuits, to know whether it's even possible to achieve the sound I want with what I built. And I don't think it's just me, when you build a circuit, you really don't care how it works, you are simply amazed that it works and that you made it. When I built the Condor cab simulator from runoffgroove.com, I played it for days before I started to notice, or rather started to want to notice, its limitations and flaws. But then some other schematics popped-up and so I abandoned it because "yaaay let's build something new!".
So I really encourage everyone to learn how audio circuits work, especially if you think you don't need to, because there are tested schematics around. Even if everything you built works flawlessly, there will be something that won't. And sometimes it's just a really simple thing to do to correct it. Or there is something that works, but may work (sound) better with just a small adjustments. Or you can even design you own circuit, which should be quite an achievement if you were only building someone else's schematics for now.
Ways to learn all this stuff are endless. I for example just enrolled in an online course on coursera.org called Introduction to electronics. But as always, Youtube is a fine source for everything.
