Suddenly madly busy making loads of pedals. It’s still fun – which is definitely weird.
Decided not to mention the so-called ‘dubstep’ pedal any more; just get on and finish the thing, I’ve talked about it too much…
Quick
Reply
shop window chemical mock
Nice shop window at Macari’s in London’s Denmark St, a Dr Freakenstein Fuzz DrFF-3 centrally placed – with some Colorsound pedals either side. Reflection of me with camera.
I’m having to etch a couple of boards by hand – slopping chemicals about. It’s a bore, but writing this (with one hand) fills in the time…
Meanwhile her
e’s a mock-up of the dubstep pedal…
It’ll be one of the new ‘Department Of Connections’ line by Rainger FX.
WUB!
The so-called dubstep pedal seems to be progressing – sounds very good and extreme. I found a great sawtooth LFO schematic that is a big improvement on the previous one, and the pitch-to-voltage converter seems to working OK. I’m just wrestling to keep get it all fully controllable… Breadboard intermittent. Haven’t got a name yet, but got some design ideas.
Minor Concussion
Working on Minor Concussion, the triggered compressor. Got a quite nice sounding circuit going; some squash – with good tone, no distortion, nice snap at the start of notes. It’s an optical compressor (working with 
LED/LSR to lower gain in an amplifier), and each time I work on it I get rid of more and more parts – and it sounds better… That’s got to be a good thing, right? And I keep playing through it. I need to add a ‘recovery’ knob.
Got the tap-tempo bit of it working well…
I compare it with the mighty Boss CS-2 Compression Sustainer – which is fairly unbeatable (though it does add its own tonal colouration). I bought it ages ago, and loved it so much I found a second one – so I could mix tracks through them in stereo. The CS-2 is so exciting when you crank up the compression.
Plastic rules
Here’s a videoclip for the El Distorto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf6GJ6YXCng , made by Prymaxe Vintage. It’s just stills of the stompbox, but… I have to say it looks great. Plastic is so amazing, the colour being inside – and part of – the actual material. It’s actually made of colour. And orange plastic is slightly translucent, and almost… edible. So much better than painted orange. I’d make everything out of plastic if you could stand on it.
Someone’s put serious effort into the soundtrack, by the way.
Thinly veiled gear envy
Dennis Kayzer made a couple of videoclips for the latest Dr Freakenstein Fuzz (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBT9DA4E5fc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_wQIfbm3mc ). I was a bit nervous about what he’d do, but I think they’re so great. He’s really put time and effort into showcasing the pedal in all the best ways; everything he plays suits the whole vibe of it (lots of old-skool arcade game sounds). He’s better at using the Igor controller than I am.
I do say that I’ve got a huge amount of incredible pedals… but he could just blow us all out the water.
Meanwhile, what with recovering from illness etc, I seem to be at alow ebb at the moment… Can’t seem to get stuck into anything.
That’s why I’m writing this.
Dubstep; a bad idea (you knew it all along, didn’t you?)
Well one of my new ideas turned out good – the so-called ‘dubstep’ pedal. ‘Cept you can only use single notes – and don’t play them too hard! And how often would I actually use it?? Me – who (as you can imagine) has no hesitation in plugging in a box to get a new sound that fits.
Meanwhile the ‘mode 2′ section of it works well, in fact too well; play a chord into that side of it and it burbles away, trying to find the actual pitch of it (trying to process a whole bunch of notes/harmonics at once). And not in a good-sounding way.
Is it OK buying a pedal, and reading the instruction manual (I know, I know – just pretend you do) that says ‘don’t do this – or this… And use it in this kind of way…’? That’s just no good. Mind you, people do go along with this with octave-down pedals.
So I think, do I want to invest so much time and money into something that iffy? Of course! But I don’t think I’m going to. (At least not as it is now….)
I currently spend a large part of my day playing the new audioclip over and over
Finally got the audioclip up for the Dr Freakenstein Fuzz DrFF-3… I think it shows a lot of potential. I like my photo-switch photos (that you change with the mouse?). I’d like the whole site to be full of them – interactive photos, maybe a before-and-after. Something to do once I’ve finished all the problems I’m currently wrestling with.
I’ve got to remember my own advice; don’t just battle away at the next problem in front of you – can you just walk around it, or ignore it?
Writing a blog to avoid hard work
When I first started making stompboxes for other people, I was building all kinds of mad pedals that required a ton of fiddly, time-consuming work. I just thought, ‘if someone actually wants them I’ll be so delighted that I won’t mind the work that goes into them’.
Well it turns out that people do actually want them; they’re priced unrealistically for how long they take – amazing bargains. Meanwhile though I’ve honed down the production process for new models, making them quicker and easier to produce, and with a higher work-first-time percentage. And as they’re quicker to make, they’re cheaper – and more popular.
But people still order the other older ones. At the moment I’m making several of them, and one or two of them are acting strangely, and it is a massive pain to sort out. They’re quite complicated (it’s good to stretch your ability), but… right now I am really going through it, trying to get everything right.
It is hard work.
So, maybe in future I’ll price them so that I’ll be alot happier to make them. Or just replace them with newer models. Writing this blog is a nice distraction from these problems… But they’re there lurking in the back of my mind. I just think in a year’s time I will have solved these current problems.
And probably be working a bunch of new ones.
My sixteenth distortion?
Of course one of the new pedal ideas has got to be a distortion. I mean guitarists like these alot… I’ve got 14 or 15 I think. But I could really do with another – one that does something new, a bit different.
A while ago a ‘descant’ effect was suggested to me. It creates a tone one and a half octaves above the original note – that’s a fifth and an octave above. Fifths are quite neat; strong-sounding and fairly ubiquitous, and a quiet high fifth tucked away above the original note just before it slams into some ferocious overdrive circuit, might sound quite big. Might sound like burbling nonsense when you play a chord into it, but it’s worth a try.
So I’ve got the beginning circuit on the test bed.
But all that comes out is the input – with a squared-off waveform. I can tell this, by the way, not only through how it sounds, but also by looking at the waveform on my new handheld oscilloscope!
I tweaked further – with no improvement, and decided to leave it for today – and make some Igors.