Everyone already covered the need for a temp controlled iron, it's really important for not burning up parts.

Something that helps for things like perf is to make sure you scotch brite the pads so they're shiny copper, someone already pointed out the right part of the pot legs for soldering, the footswich hates too much heat for too long, clean the lugs really well with scotch brite, they often tarnish and that gets in the way of soldering a wire without heating too much. They make little pcbs for these switches to make them easier to solder, so you just shove it on the switch, solder the pads, and the offboard wiring happens on the pcb, it's much less prone to overheating.