u/AirFell85

I recently saw a post in r/basspedals where someone had their pedal board set up entirely with pedals that use top mounted input jacks. Each pedal side by side looked so clean!

I've been designing my first pedal from the ground up for the last few months and my original enclosure design was your traditional side input/output jacks. Now I'm considering top jacks because of the potential for such a clean pedalboard layout.

Any thoughts on the DIY community about top vs side?

So I've breadboarded a couple pedal designs that work and I'm ready to make my own. I've got a few things I know for sure I want to make but I'm frozen thinking about input buffers.

Should I by default build an input buffer into all of my pedals? If I were to ever start selling my pedals should that be a common thing?

Sorry if this is dumb question. I searched and looked around and couldn't find much info on how common it is to build them into pedals or not.

Doing the thing again where I shop around for strings to see what's up. One of my basses intonation is set up specifically for Drop-D with a tone set for that Justin Chancellor prog bass sound.

Currently using a set of Daddario nickel roundwounds in 45-65-85-105 but they've long since lost their zing and want to get a new set. Since I'm in drop D I'd like that string to be a bit tighter and came across these two sets of strings that looked interesting:

D'Addario EXL170BT Balanced Tension 45-60-80-107 and D'Addario EPS300 ProSteel Long Scale Tapered 43-63-85-107

Both sets giving me a slightly higher gauge on the dropped D string, but also changing the gauge on the rest a bit too. Was curious if anyone had experience with these sets.

One of the things I appreciate the most about Opeth is the non-traditional song structure.

On my drive home spotify sent me Paranoid Android by Radiohead, a personal favorite. I started thinking about how that song really travels and has its ups and downs across a dynamic range along with tempo changes and good transitions... and then Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen came to mind as another song that travels. And then Stairway to Heaven by Led Zepplin came to mind...

The thing is as a kid those kinds of songs were always my favorite. Opeth is my favorite band, and pretty much their whole catalog plays out like that, so it makes sense.

What other songs can you guys think of that are like that?