SLAMGAUGE

Lets start off easy. If you have never even worked a soldering iron before then I would not recommend dropping a grand on a Seventh Circle Audio kit. From what I have heard those are pretty intricate and take quite a bit of patience to put together. You want to start off light and cheap for your intro to DIY audio. In need of any guitar foot pedals?

Head over to Build Your Own Clone and check out their range of guitar pedal kits. There you will find a clone kit for a ton of different classic pedals, one should be perfect for you. Order yourself a kit and have some fun. These pedals are of much better quality than the pedals you would be able to pick up at guitar center and they are a bit cheaper. Plus they have an extensive forum and a good set of FAQs for helping the noobs. If you are really new to this I would recommend searching YouTube for some soldering tips.

Moving up in difficulty and price you have the Hamptone Mic Preamp Kit. This bad boy sits feels right in place with the big boys of mic preamps. The whole kit will put you back about a grand but that is about a fourth of what you would pay for a preamp like this at a music store. Here is where you are gonna need some experience playing with resistors and such. If you cant tell your 10k from your 100 ohm then you might want to get some help or practice with some smaller stuff. I am not trying to dissuade you but it can get a bit tricky, though there is nothing a bit of patience and double/triple checking yourself won't compensate for. There is a good entry at Mojo Pie detailing the ins and outs of working with this kit and the rewards therein. Read through that and you should get a good idea of what you are up against. Still keep in mind, this is a superior mic preamp for super cheap!

If you have done a number of DIY projects already and have a firm grasp on this kinda stuff, you may want to jump right up to the Seventh Circle Audio line of kits. The components one these are very tightly spaced so you will need to be good with a soldering iron. With these kits you get a chassis with enough space for eight different components and you choose how to populate the rig. They have five different types of mic preamps to choose from so you can mix and match. You could have one of every kind with enough room for to pair up your favorites. Filling the chassis up will run well over a grand considering you need a power supply, chassis and wiring rig as a base to which you can add the pre amp modules to will cost you at lease $588, before shipping. But once you have the base unit and at least one module set up and running you can add to it as you please, or when your budget allows.

You can find kits and projects like these all over the intertubes. A quick search will pop up all kinds of projects you can work on. Perhaps the stuff I have talked about so far is a bit daunting but you are still interested in trying your DIY hand on some cheap and fun projects. Check out the CMOY pocket headphone amp. This was my first DIY audio project. For a cheap and useful audio project, this can't be beat. Just get Altoids tin and some parts and get to soldering. If you are a total noobie then this is really a great place to start. You will be banging your head on the wall for a while if you miss a step but it is very gratifying to use a bit of audio gear that you built yourself. You could also try your hand at building a Gainclone amp for your speaker driving needs.

With the abundance of tutorials and how-to guides all over the interwebs it should not be hard for you to find a project that really gets you excited. Kits are readily available as well as guides for modifying existing stomp boxes and other audio gear. Even if you just want to do some silly tinkering you can try your hand at circuit bending and go all Frankenstein on some old noise making toys. The main thing is to have fun with it.