Its July, its hot.

We talk a lot about guitar pedals. Circuits. Components. Tones. Whether it's a fuzz that rips or a delay that swims, the DIY pedal world is full of sound, solder, and opinion. But underneath all that, there's something more. Something nobody puts on the schematic: us. The builders. For many of us, this isn’t just about tone. It’s about meaning. About having something that’s ours, even when everything else feels like it's slipping.

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🎸 What Makes a Pedal Yours?🎸

It’s easy to look at a finished pedal and see just a box of parts. A few knobs, some shiny jacks, a catchy name printed across the front. But that’s not what makes it yours, is it?

What makes a pedal yours is everything a factory couldn’t possibly replicate.

It’s the dodgy solder joint that somehow holds — a little miracle you stare at like it might confess how it survived. It’s the capacitor you jammed in backwards because your head was foggy, full of that static that comes from three bad nights of sleep and two months of burnout — but you found the error. You fixed it. It’s the singed edge of the PCB where your iron slipped. A scar that echoes one of your own. It’s the decision to close the lid even though something in you whispered it wasn’t perfect — because you needed a win that day, not perfection.

And above all, it’s the story.

Because factory pedals don’t have stories. DIY pedals do.

Each build you make carries a fingerprint — of your mood, your mindset, your patience (or complete lack of it), your stubborn refusal to quit. Some are built like precision-engineered satellites — neat joints, pristine wiring, labels aligned to the millimetre. Others are chaos with a faceplate: a loud, fuzz-drenched mess of colour and tone that shouldn't work... but does. Because some of us are wired for NASA-level execution. And others? Others can paint a Van Gogh with a crayon from a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

That’s the beauty of it. A DIY pedal doesn’t need to win awards. It just needs to mean something.

Then you plug it in, stick it on your board, and your mate leans in and goes:

“Oh cool, that a Big Muff clone?”

And in that moment, you smile.

Because no — it’s not just a clone. It’s the one you built when you’d just come out the other side of a breakdown. It’s the one you boxed up after four nights of obsessive troubleshooting, convinced you’d lost your touch. It’s the one you named after your old dog, or a mate you miss, or a bloody stupid inside joke that makes you grin every time you stomp on it.

But your mate doesn’t see that. They can’t.

They don’t see the hours spent tracing voltage paths across schematics until your eyes went square. They don’t see the panic of a cold joint you swore you’d already reflowed. They don’t see the solder burn on your fingertip that still itches when you play. They don’t see the way that build helped you claw back a sense of purpose, or silence the mental noise just long enough to remember who you were.

They just hear a tone.

You hear survival.

That’s what makes a pedal yours.

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🧠 More Than Tone — Mental Health in the Solder Fumes 🧠

Let’s not pretend this is just about electronics.

For some people, pedal building is a hobby. A fun weekend escape. A way to mess with circuits and chase the perfect tone.

For others, it’s not like that at all.

It’s survival.

It’s quiet time in a world that’s always too loud, too bright, too demanding. It’s focus when your brain is chewing itself inside out, looking for the off switch. It’s purpose on days when getting out of bed feels like lifting a mountain. It’s progress — no matter how small — when everything else feels stuck, heavy, pointless.

And when you live with mental illness, you learn real quick: This isn’t just “feeling a bit off.” It’s being in a room full of people and still feeling like you’re not required. It’s going through the motions, smiling for the camera, while something inside you quietly breaks. It’s holding conversations, packing orders, answering questions — all while wondering if you’re broken, or worse... invisible.

It’s showing up to the bench with a head full of static and grief and wires and asking:

Is this the day I get the circuit — or myself — to work?

We don’t talk enough about how cruel that space is. How exhausting it is to keep fighting a battle no one sees.

People say “It’s okay not to be okay. ” And sure, I get it. It’s meant to be supportive. But honestly? It’s not okay. Not even a bit.

It’s hell sometimes. Its wank.

What is okay, though — is accepting it. Taking the mask off. Sitting in the truth of it. And rebuilding something that might just keep you going for another day.

We need to change the narrative.

We need to stop sugar-coating the war and start telling the truth about the cost of living inside a mind that won’t play fair.

I’m writing this now in the start of it. Not at the end. Not with some polished takeaway. I’ve never been more unwell than I am right now. And it’s rough.

See, the cruel joke of healing is this: sometimes you get worse before you get better. You pull up the floorboards and find rot beneath. You try to move forward, and suddenly every buried memory, every repressed grief, every unspoken ache... demands to be heard.

And your brain? It doesn’t just whisper. It screams. It hurts.

In my case, it's literally hurting. My hip — there’s no injury. But it started screaming the day we buried Steve, 2 years ago. Now it won’t stop. Somatic trauma, they call it. My brain is turning grief and pain into physical symptoms. Every step, a reminder. Every day, a tightrope walk between numb and agony.

And the worst part?

My brain’s faulty — but it also sees things clearly. That’s the torture of it. Because how can you trust what you see when you don’t trust the lens you’re seeing it through?

It traps you in this bizarre cycle: you doubt everything, yet feel everything. You know what’s real — and still wonder if you’re making it all up.

I watch the rain as it turns red.

And still, I come back to the bench. Back to the soldering iron. Back to the thing that asks just enough of me to drown out the noise. Back to the circuits that sometimes feel like the only thing that make sense.

Mental illness doesn’t just want to break you. It wants to isolate you. It wants you to believe you’re the only one building pedals at midnight with tears in your eyes and plasters on your fingers.

You’re not.

This — all of this — is real. And it’s happening to more of us than anyone wants to admit.

So let’s admit it.

Let’s talk about it. Let’s stop pretending and start bleeding in public, where the healing can happen.

Because the opposite of isolation isn’t company. It’s connection.

And I promise — if you’re in it, you’re not alone.

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❤️ You’re Not Alone, Even If You Feel Like You Are ❤️

JedsPeds has never just been about pedals. It’s about people who needed somewhere to be. Be messy. Be overwhelmed. Be tired and still curious. Be frustrated, be learning, be quietly proud. It’s a solder-stained sanctuary for those of us whose heads don’t always sit straight.

Every kit built in this community is more than just a tone box. It’s a small act of rebellion. Against despair. Against silence. Against the idea that we have to be “fine” all the time.

You don’t have to be fine. You just have to be here. That’s enough.

We try and show up for each other. That’s why we run things like Monday Moments — quiet reminders that progress doesn’t always look impressive. Sometimes it’s just tidying your bench. Or building through tears. Or drinking the red drink instead of the red wine. Sometimes, it’s just not vanishing. That counts.

And yet — here’s the irony. I pour myself into meaningful, real posts like this. And the most engaged-with thing I’ve ever posted? A silly satire that took under 30 seconds to produce about a fictional orange man.

That’s the world we live in. So divided that even a joke can detonate the room.

But if we’re ever going to heal — really heal — it won’t be through louder arguments or cleverer memes. It’ll be through showing up. For real. For each other. For ourselves.

So if you’re here today, reading this — that means you’re still building. Even if the world’s a bit noisy. Even if you’re a bit noisy.

Next time you look at your pedal and think “It’s not perfect,” remember: neither are any of us. But we’re still worth building.

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What about you? What’s kept you at the bench, even when your brain wasn’t playing ball?

Let’s talk about it. This is the stuff that matters.