Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Turmoil ringmodulator running...

I found a bit of time to redo the design of a ringmod I built exactly last year. This new one has an added lowpass filter, fine-tuning control and expression pedal support for the frequency. I've also improved the noise gate enough that I no longer need a control pot for calibration. It sounds much better! Carrier bleed is pretty-much non-existant even with high-frequencies. I've removed triange/squarewave blending because square wasn't very interesting and in fact worstened the bleed.

Over the next few days, I will be drawing up a PCB layout and hopefully building a final prototype before I make batches of these.





Happy new year!

Monday, December 22, 2008

another Dying Sonar video

First 3 minutes are random noodling/bad playing. I was playing better earlier today, honest! Then for 30 seconds I'm having trouble with the sound. After that it's all drone. Main purpose of the video is to show how it interacts with a guitar.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Dying Sonar pedal synth

Have a little time this xmas holiday and I'm not quite inspired enough yet to start doing the PCB layout for my massive dronebox project, so I started something easier.





It's a simple idea. Make an oscillator (I used the ones I fixed up for the dronebox project), make an LFO (based on part of the Tremulus Lune and somewhat modified) and have the LFO modulate the volume of the oscillator. And make it in stompbox format.

It can either be an instrument or a pedal somewhere in the middle of the chain. It does absolutelly nothing to the guitar signal that passes through it. It will add pulsating beeps, drones, tones how fast and how slow you want them. It's great for electroacoustic/ambient sets where you need a rythmic bassy tone in the background! Loop it, and all kind of layering possibilities open up! The controls are as follows:

Volume: volume. does not affect passing-through guitar signal.
Smooth: blends between sawtooth and squarewave LFO
Space: space between pulses less or more
Speed: tempo of the LFO. extremelly slow (like 2 BPM) to way too fast (pulses smeared together)
Shape: oscillator shape blends between triangle and square
Freq: frequency of oscillator. used with Range toggle switch will get you anything between 10Hz to >18KHz

Paints are acrylic and the finish is clear epoxy resin. It has a couple impendance and volume problems which I need to fix, but it works okay if you don't use an amp. Here's a brief video with me goofing off on it: