Hiya @Bryan22… I feel your pain, man. I really do. Some things you mentioned are why I’ve begun and given up on DIY about 4x in the last 5 years. But I’m doing it differently this time, and actually having FUN with it. Kind of a book, sorry.
Everyone else here has told you what they suggest from their very experienced with DIY’ standpoint.
Just keep in mind my advice is from total from standpoint of a total DIY Noobie with a really, really inexact taste palate, so don’t jump on me guys if I say something that goes against the grain of the ‘right’ way to do it… this is just my ‘This is actually working for me now, when some ‘traditional’ attempts to get into DIY in the past haven’t worked for me at all’ spiel.
My suggestion Bryan22 is to cut way back on your own attempts to build recipes right now. There’s THOUSANDS of great recipes on ELR, ATF, etc. Mix and adapt existing recipes for a few weeks,to a few mos, and then I swear you’ll get a better feel for the % to mix a flavor at, and what such and such mixer may have meant when they wrote that weirdo taste note that made no sense to me before.
Figure out what you like to vape most, from a flavor standpoint. Make sure your flavor stash is updated to include all the flavors you have. Use your ‘What can I make?’ Sherlock button in your stash page, so you’re focused primarily on recipes that you actually have the flavors to build. You can also just go to ELR home and spend a few hours searching for things you like in existing recipes. You can search for something as general as ‘cereal’ or ‘cream’, or something much more specific, like ‘Red Velvet’. Remember to ‘heart’ recipes to your faves, and make a few folders in your faves, so you can keep them sorted as you go.
After you get search results, click on the ‘ratings’ bar at the far right… that will sort your recipes starting from the most highly rated to the least. After all, the goal is to find some recipes that you love that are well built by talented mixologists, and that you can tweak for a bit. So unless there’s less than a few recipes available, or something sounds so delicious to you that you can’t resist…skip the recipes posted by people you’ve not heard of with no ratings. If you have 2 ‘angel food cake’ recipes, try the one most highly rated first, basically.
Even with highly rated recipe that sounds like something you’ll enjoy, that people rave about in the comments, you won’t necessarily love everything that you mix… that’s ok. Just be as precise as you can with your measurements when you mix (grab a digital scale if you don’t already have one… you can get one under 5$ at DX,com). That way you know you’ve mixed it accurately, and if you mix something that sound amazing and has good reviews, and you wait out the steep and its still yucky to you… no worries, just set it aside and move onto the next one.
Your goal here is to a) have some vapable successes that you really enjoy vaping, and can happily return to again and again so you’re never frustrated by your mixing failures, and b) over the course of mixing recipes of others, figuring out what you like in a recipe and what you really dislike, you’ll also begin to recognize taste notes in certain flavors that carry over from recipe to recipe.
For instance, I was TOTALLY confused by Bavarian Cream. No freaking clue what makes a cream ‘Bavarian’ as opposed to Sweet, or Meringue, or whatever. Flavor notes were all contradictory and didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But after a few mos of playing with good recipes by great mixers… I damn sure can recognize in a juice if I’m tasting Bavarian Cream TFA, now. And NOW when I read tasting notes for that flavor, references to ‘eggy’ or ‘wet’ or ‘full mouthfeel’ begin to come clear, as I’ve got a frame of reference for that flavor based on my own experiences with it, and how it works in recipes, now.
You’ll also start to get a feel for how to recognize a well crafted recipe, and kind of an idea of how strong to mix certain flavors. Also, you’ll find tips that will help you a lot once you start constructing your own recipes. IE: if you always seem to love recipes with Strawberry that combine strawberry ripe TFA and CAP Sweet Strawberry at a certain percentage… next time you want to create a strawberry recipe, you know where to start as a jumping off point with your strawberry component.
And lastly, once you find a few DIY recipes of others that you love to vape, Now you can start tweaking that existing recipe, trying to decide if you want to change a lil something here or there. For instance, there’s a great recipe for VLR’s Ella’s Shortbread Biscuit in ELR database. Everyone raves about it… and it’s pretty damned amazing as is. But now that I’ve mixed it and vaped it for a few weeks, I’ve decided I want to mix up a ‘buttery’ version, to be more like a Scottish shortbread that melts in your mouth. Also know from my amazing love of NotCharlesManson’s Birthday Cake recipe that I really love FW Cake Batter Dip, because it has interesting cream cheese tangy notes… so I decided I want to tweak VLR’s recipe a few x to see how those ideas end up.
Now that was a hell of a long ramble to try to explain a simple idea, but moral of story I was frustrated when I kept trying to skip the steps of familiarizing myself with a recipe well crafted by someone else, and how to adapt them to my own needs, and tried to jump right into mixing up flavors all willy nilly. I got nowhere like that, personally. I’m still not doing my own recipes for more than a flavor or two… but I’ll get there. And in the meantime I’m learning a ton, and REALLY enjoying the hell out of my DIY attempts for the first time, ever.
Hang in there! Don’t give up… you’ll find a few recipes of others that you love vaping and somehow all those flavor notes etc will begin to make sense, and you can build on your knowledge of how to craft a recipe that is well rounded and enjoyable to you from there.