How do you mock up elect circuits? Perfboard?

[Jedi Clampett]

I have some ideas about wiring electric guitars and bass guitars. These are all combinations of existing circuits available online.
Anyway, want to mock up circuits and try them out before committing to the final wiring. What I am thinking is using a perfboard to mock up circuits and connect to the PU with alligator clips. Just wondering what you do to test out circuits prior to final wiring of the guitar circuit?

In addition a frequent desire is to wire something with a true bypass. I wonder if this can be done with a dpdt switch? For example switching a guitarfetish mod board in and out of the circuit?

[Halgeir Wold]

I've been doing prototypes and one-off designs 'professsionally' for close to 40 years. Perf board is quite OK, as long as the designs are not too complex.
I've also used perf board for one-off's that has been on in operation 24/7 for years, with no problems. For circuits with very high gain or higher frequencies, stray capacitance may sometimes cause stabiliity issues. Wire wrap is also another technique that is easy for mock ups or prototypes, but works best for lots of ICs. The special test boards where you just push components and pieces of wire into socket type connectors also work......
The DPDT for bypass is OK, but may cause som nice thumps with high volume setting....

[Peter Wilcox]

The special test boards where you just push components and pieces of wire into socket type connectors also work......

That's how I do it.

[Jedi Clampett]

well for me the interest is in the circuitry within the guitar, will be doing things like adding graphtech piezo bridges, guitarfetish mod boards, coil cutting etc. My goals are to have ordinary looking guitars with minimal knobs, but big features, in some cases replacing pots with resisters so that the functions are invisible, but activated thru pot switches etc.

[Peter Wilcox]

Well, if you're just wiring things together in the guitar, wire them up and see how they work/sound. If you have the pickups, pots, switches installed in the guitar and want to hook them up to mod boards or other circuits outside the guitar, just solder on long leads and pull them out through the jack hole or the control cavity and solder or alligator clip them to the external circuits or through a solderless breadboard as in the picture above

Or maybe I'm not understanding your question..

[Jedi Clampett]

I think the only true test for guitar circuits is to wire them up and listen to the result. For example if you have an onboard efx, do you put it in front of something or after something? the answer is to try it both ways. Seems to me before I try and fit all the circuitry in the guitar, that I should be pleased with the result and so putting on perfboard or solderless board and trying the different combinations to find the best result. Finding sweet spots on pots for example, you find that spot and then measure the pot, replace with a resister, bingo just disappeared a pot and got the sweet spot, or if there are many sweet spots put on a rotary switch for presets. I just don't want to keep dragging the circuitry out of the guitar every time I want to make a change. So my purpose is to find out what you do?

[David King]

A "sweet spot" is invariably going to be affected by things outside the guitar like the cord's self-capacitance and the amp's input impedance.
Something to keep in mind before you try to lock everything down for good.