Hi Dodge. Welcome to the hobby and the forum.
Pedal building is a very specialized niche in electronics, with its own set of customs, habits, jargon, etc. When you search online, focus your googling on pedal-specific questions rather than on 'electronics' as a whole. Having a decent familiarity with general electronics is very helpful for troubleshooting, modifying, and designing circuits, but if you just want to build pre-existing circuits, you can take a paint-by-numbers approach. It's really up to you.
There are lots of pedal-specific sites that offer lots of useful info.
Madbean has good tutorials, including
one on the footswitch and
another one that answers your question about stereo input jacks.
Beavis has lots of good info, especially on the
tech pages. The links section on the
main page of this site has lots more for you to browse.
AMZ has good
technical articles, as does
Geofex, especially the
Technology of ... articles.
My personal favorites are the
freestompboxes and
diystompboxes forums, because they are full of technical analysis of the circuits. Forum members reverse-engineer the circuits of commercial pedals (and amps, etc.), and do technical analysis of them. People also post their own non-commercial circuits, mods, and general ideas. Lots of designers post there, including commercial builders like Brian Wampler, RG Keen, and Paul Cochrane (who designed your Timmy), etc. Lots of boutique builders learned how to design pedals on these forums, and many of them will post their own schematics, and talk through their design decisions. The posts there tend to get pretty technical, so some of the discussion may go over your head, but you'll learn a lot if you just pick some threads that interest you and read through them.
Most of the sites I linked to will have lots of links to other useful sites, so spend some time surfing and bookmarking and you'll have your own reference list.
There are some pedal-specific books out there, but I haven't read them, so I can't offer any recommendations. Maybe someone else will chime in on that.
For questions about electronic circuits in general, I like Wikipedia. Most pedal circuits are built up from combinations of building block subcircuits, so if you get familiar with those building blocks you will start to spot them in schematics pretty quickly. I'd start with
common emitter and
common source amplifiers,
common collector and
common drain buffers, and
inverting and
non-inverting op-amps. The related article links at the bottom of these articles are good for browsing other topics, but many of them won't be pedal-specific. If you read these articles and then look at pedal schematics, read the threads at FSB and DIYSB, or read the articles on AMZ or Geofex, you will start to see those building blocks repeated over and over in slightly different configurations. For example, the vast majority of Lovepedal's products are just variations on the basic common emitter amplifier.
I don't recommend trying to analyze layouts. Try to find the schematic for whatever pedal you're building and analyze that instead. Most of them are available somewhere on the internet, often at FSB and DIYSB, and others of the links I provided above.
I hope I didn't overwhelm you with links. You can do fine by just building kits or following layouts. If you get stuck or have questions, don't hesitate to post them here. You won't waste our time or embarrass yourself. Everybody starts somewhere, and lots of us enjoy troubleshooting and explaining concepts. I usually check here once a day to see if there are any interesting questions to answer.
Enjoy your Timmy. It's a great circuit.
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