Phyllis III Multi-Octave Synth Fuzz

I designed this pedal to allow me to recreate the synth tone from an old song of mine on the guitar. It derives five different signals from the input — an overdrive, two square wave fuzzes with slightly different duty cycles and frequency responses, and one and two octaves down. The output stage is a mixer with some frequency-dependent gating that adds some permutation of four of the five channels.

It has a “glitch” mode that pits the two square-fuzzes against each other to drive the suboctaves. In glitch mode, the attack and harmonics influence which of the two fuzz signals gets through the gate. The result is some lovely glitchy breakup that dances between the fundamental and even harmonics thereof as you play.

Each of the derived signals is filtered differently on the way out, shaving off some of the harsh higher-order harmonics. This provides a rich, bassy, synth tone without a lot of “tin.”

It’s a lot of fun.

The artwork on each was made by covering the enclosure in black caligraphy ink, waiting for it to set, and scratching out doodles and control labels using a small screwdriver.

SR-03 Phaser

This is a six-stage phaser, arranged in three pairs of phase shifters, with a frequency toggle for each — providing eight total modulation patterns. One of the eight permutations provides neat approximtions of an MXR Phase 90-like classic phaser; another provides a nice, liquidy, univibe-type modulation.

There is no LFO, no LDR’s, LED’s, or lightbulbs. There are no JFET’s. I don’t have any OTA’s to play with!

The circuit is built around CMOS transmission gates that are switched at supersonic frequencies to modulate the transfer curve of sets of all-pass filters. This is a “digitally-controlled analog” pedal: the signal path is all analog, but the modulation is controlled by a digital clock and counter.

There is one toggle switch for each of three phase shifting pairs, a “center” control that sets the modulation midpoint, a range control which controls the magnitude of the shift from center, and a rate control that adjusts the speed at which the modulation varies.

Bonus: in addition to the standard periodic shift pattern, it also also has a random mode. When random is engaged, the range and center controls are used as inputs to a psuedo-random hash functiion that causes the modulation to jump sharply from one frequency band to another at irregular intervals. At slower speeds this almost sounds like an arpeggiator, due to the alternating prominence of different harmonics. At fast speeds, it sounds like your guitar is submerged in a bubbling lake.

(The board also facilitates MIDI/expression control, but I didn’t put any external jacks on the units from the initial run).

The art for these is acryllic on aluminum — though the one featured above is the original prototype, which sports an inkjet graphic that is haphazardly affixed to the face of the unit.

Manwë Chorus

This is chorus pedal designed around the MN3208 BBD. I think it’s a lot of fun, owing to the wide variety of sounds you can get out of it.

It has five controls:

• Volume
• Wobble: controls the magnitude of the wet signal’s delay — i.e. how far ahead and behind of the delay center point the delayed signal will swing.
• Center: this is a four-stop rotary toggle that controls the center point of the delay. On the small end, the delay midpoint is in flanger territory — 10-20 milliseconds. On the large end, the delay midpoint is on the long-end of a “chorus” delay, approaching the timing of a slapback reverb. The two middle settings yield more classic chorus timings, allowing tidy approximations of a fairly wide range of classic chorus pedals.
• Rate: is your standard LFO speed control
• Depth: is a wet/dry mix control. On the low end, the chorus effect can be made very sublte, fattening up the guitar tone without much in the way of perceivable modulation. On the high end, the wet signal is actually about 3dB louder than the dry, facilitating a vibrato sound that can span the gamut from “church organ” to “seasick pitch wobbling” (if you’ve ever played the old SNES game, Earthbound, you’ll get the gist).

The art on each is a variation of the artwork I did for the “Lucy Spacesuit”¹ editions of my overdrive pedal. It’s acryllic paint — variously applied with a fine-tipped brush or else using paint pens.

P-38 Distortion

This pedal uses the basic Big Muff topology for the gain and clipping stages — with some caveats: the clipping stages are more heavily frequency dependent, the range and symmetry of frequencies clipped is adjustable via a three way toggle; rather than being an HPF/LPF mix control, the tone knob adjusts the phase rotation and relative weight of two copies of the signal — yielding usable tones across the full range of the control, at the expense of less extreme extremes.

It doesn’t facilitate “muffled” lows or “sack of razorblades and tin” highs (I’m not knocking those, either! Sometimes, those are exactly what you want! I get it!). It is designed to produce a fairly wide range of distortion tones that range from “fat” to “cutting.”

The natural tone of the guitar can shine through or be compressed out almost entirely, depending on the gain setting. The clipping stages have a higher LPF cutoff than is typical of Muffs and Muff clones. This allows for some really gnarly pinch harmonics, but is still low enough to prevent the screaming, high-frequency, feedback when nothing is being played.

I think it sounds pretty great.

The artwork on these units are “sky and clouds” backdrops — each of which is inspired by a different photo from an evergrowing collection of sky photos I’ve taken in and around the Hudson Valley.