Never Meet Your Heroes

There is an old saying that goes something like never meet your heroes, you'll only be disappointed. I've found this also applies to components for building guitar pedals. Way back in 2021 I built my ROG Umble that required J201 JFETs, which was a whole new experience for me in more ways than one. Up to that point I had shied away from building circuits that required JFETs solely because they were all obsolete and out of stock, rendering many circuits I wanted to build useless endeavors. Eventually I did manage to find SMD J201s and horribly soldered up my own conversation boards to make them through-hole. Luckily the Umble circuit has biasing trimpots, because my homemade versions needed quite a bit of dialing in. Even though I made my own and the pedal sounds pretty good, after getting it dialed in. I do still wondered what it would sound like with real, true J201s.

I dreamed of the day when I might actually be able to touch a real J201, like so many other pedal builders before me. I wouldn't take for granted that I was part of the club, while so many may never have that chance to do so. Well, that was how I felt before I managed to purchase some real J201s. I mean, they're J201s. When I received them I put them into the Umble circuit and it sounded the same, meaning my slapdash homemade J201s were no worse than the authentic through-hole component I had always dreamt about.

I'm not saying they're bad, it's just that I built up this wonderful world in my head based on a component being unobtainium and not on the reality that it's just a J201. With my delusional head I thought that the authentic through-holes would have yielded far better results than the little things I soldered up so poorly. The differences, if any, were imperceptible. I guess it's my fault for thinking they would be any different, or perhaps having little faith in my homemade J201s being any good. What I've learned is components are components and they'll generally do what you expect from them, no matter if they're hard to find or the easier to find equivalent.