I've never joined a forum before but I wanted to express my appreciation to the owners and contributors to this fantastic site. A year ago I probably wouldn't have been able to identify a resistor, capacitor, transistor etc. in a pile of components, Amazingly over the last 6 months I've been able to build over 30 working circuits. The last 5 or 6 actually fired up on the first try, a great feeling :). Old dogs can learn new tricks (though admittedly at a slower pace with a greater effort lol).
Only about half of them have been boxed up so far. Most of them I give to my son as he is a prolific home recorder and plays out about once a week.He has aspirations of someday making a living at music so its my way of contributing to the cause ( actually I'm hoping if he does make it and gets a bigtime recording contract he'll remember his poor old dad slaving away under the hot soldering iron lol). You can hear him using the fuzz factory I made for him at
http://ghostvoice1.bandcamp.com/ the fuzz factory part starts about half way through at about 3 minutes or so.
I don't think I'll be able to contribute much about electronics as I'm way behind most if not everyone here but I've been around guitars (and amps ) for over 40 years and been fortunate enough to see many great guitarist in their prime. Roy Buchanan,Ry Cooder,John McLaughlin, Michael Hedges, Andre Segovia,Frank Zappa, Hubert Sumerlin, Otis Rush and many more. Hopefully I'll be able to ad a tidbit of helpful info sometime.
Again a big THANK YOU to all that make this site possible!