Developing a good knowledge of Electrical Engineer, Sound Engineering, and Computer Science could help you a great deal either way.

While you’re in school you could supplement your education by learning on DIYstompboxes and Geofex about building pedals.

I’d recommend starting by building an NPN Dallas Rangemaster. It’s a very simple build and there’s a lot of information on them.

Also, Tim Escobedo’s Circuit Snippets has a lot of very simple designs that you could try on a breadboard. Getting a nice breadboarding set up is nice for when you start out. I like to have a breadboard mounted to a piece of wood with a big piece of metal with some input and output jacks, a power jack, and a bunch of pots can easily be mounted and removed.

here are Tim Escobedo’s Circuit Snippets:

http://www.jiggawoo.eclipse.co.uk/guitarhq/Circuitsnippets/snippets.html

Electrical Engineering or Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Learning computer science is pretty important. . . how do you think the HOG, SMMH, Cathedral, etc… were designed?

Sounds sort of like a half-cocked wah pedal.

I don’t know if I’d want a pedal that just did glide, but I’d like to be able to try out the effect without getting the V256.

Maybe if it was a feature in some kind of XO synth pedal.

Here’s what I think I did.

I put some of the HOG sliders up, focusing on the original, with a couple harmonics slightly up as well.

I put it in freeze gliss mode, and rocked the expression pedal so that the notes take on this sort of sublime feel as they get this reverby metallic glissando thing going when you have freeze gliss mode locked into about 3/4 of the way down on the expression pedal.

I used both the wet and dry outs of the HOG, so that the dry could be heard clearly without any effects on it, and the wet of the HOG could be processed more by other effects.

So here’s where the wet out of the HOG out went:

DOD-250 Overdrive: I find a little bit warms up my HOG’s sound nicely.

I tuned my frequency analyzer to the drone notes I was playing and set the mix so that it didn’t overpower the cleaner prettier notes. The frequency analyzer can get some weird buzzy stuff if you tune it super high, and can also get some awesome gong like sounds if you tune it just right.

Lastly I had the SMMH. I got a reverb setting I liked and put the blend at about 50 and recorded some droning. Then I turned the blend all the way up after recording the loop so that all the processing on the melodies would be blurrier and not clash too much with the clean melodies.

Probably HOG + Cathedral set fully wet. Dry out of HOG into a Germanium OD with the voltage turned down to get a short buzzy tone.

Sitar sounds are very hard to get with pedals though. You’ve got three things going on that are sort of hard to imitate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTPxqUtlLdo

1. Buzzy jawari bridge. There is a DIY pedal called the Jawari which sort of imitates this, though I think the germanium OD can get similar tones. It sounds kind of crappy though.

2. Sympathetic Strings. In a sitar there are strings that run through the body and the neck that ring out sympathetically with notes played that. Notice in the video that he’s just plucking individual notes yet you can here a constant pretty chordal drone in the background, those are the sympathetic strings. There really aren’t any pedals that do that. With a HOG and a Cathedral you may be able to get a multitonal reverb, and with freeze gliss half cocked it would add a nice droney sparkle to the notes and make them lag a bit.

3. Notice how every fret is movable on a sitar? That’s because in India, they don’t use an equal tempered scale, but a just intonated scale. Each note is a distinct harmonic ratio to the root note, and because of this note spacings are not equal. So if you change keys, you have to move the frets. Of course on a fretted guitar it’s impossible to imitate this.

Some people have gone the route of making their own fretlesses. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obP9A3EQnPQ

Fretlesses also conveniently reduce your sustain time, which gets you closer to the sitar sound.

Or there’s my simple sitar mimicry style- tune every string to C or D. Learn the melody lines to “Within You Without You.” Strum every string when you play notes. It will sound good.

Also, this crazy genius made a sympathetic string reverb: http://nicksworldofsynthesizers.com/stringresonator.php

I think you need a 10kohm expression pedal.

I wouldn’t recommend a DC Brick, it’s wired up pretty much just like a daisy chain.

The Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2+ is great. It’s basically eight individual power supplies, four of which can supply 9 or 12v, and two of which support higher current at 9V for current hogging digital pedals.