We often get asked if we offer DIY kits of our products. The truth is that we’d LOVE to!! The reason that we don’t is because of the unpredictable availability of the NOS parts we pack into our products. The legit bits that make these vintage circuits GO are always in short supply. NOS tubes, transistors, and even diodes, are terribly hard to find in enough quantities to keep us in production as it is, let alone putting them into DIY kits for people to build. Every week it’s a struggle to get the parts we need to keep building the products you love; it’s a large part of my personal struggle here.

With that said, we love DIY! Truth is, lots of folks that build gear for themselves buy our products,  and that’s a huge point of pride for me. DIY is how AudioScape was formed, building from scratch, but not from prefabricated kits. Building from the ground up has required us to be open in selecting the best parts for the job, whether NOS, better spec’d modern parts, or building our own legacy components in-house.

If you really want to dive into DIY, I recommend getting a breadboard circuit, learning how to read simple schematics and then applying them in smaller, simple builds. Dig right in and get your hands dirty. Start with basic 9V circuits, they can’t hurt you badly if you mess something up; there’s lots of great guitar and synth based circuits that run on lower voltages. My first pedal was built using components that came off of a VCR PCB (‘cause I had no money at the time). Frankly, I’ve never built a pre-fab “kit” in my lifetime. Why? Most kits, if not all, are designed to give you the desired result, but they skimp in the design, as well as parts selection, to try and keep costs down. There’s currently an “N”-style mic pre kit available that replaces the irreplaceable 2n3055 transistor with a modern equivalent output transistor (really? a $5 part?) and provides metal film resistors where carbon film resistors should go (talk about apples to oranges!). There’s gotta be a better way…

It’s paramount if you’re serious about DIY that you start understanding the importance of using the right components, and getting yourself to the point where you’re the one selecting them. If you subscribe blindly to the notion of prefabricated kits, you’re handicapping your growth and beholden to someone else’s simple and budget-minded version of how a classic circuit should be built. There truly is nothing more critical to how a device performs and sounds than having the right recipe, and experimenting and deciding for yourself. Push yourself, it’s a little more work in the beginning, but much better to have the control in your own hands (and brain).

Cheers,

Chris