Author Archives: ballseffects

Secular Bromanticism.

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Well, this is a big steaming pile of horseshit, aint it?  It was a surprise gift/torture device made for the inexcusable Bret Shirley (Black Congress).  The deal is that I just built this and sent it to him out of the blue, with no explanation of what did what, only which jacks were ins and which were outs. Call it a grand gesture of “figure it out yourself, dummy!” It’s presented like three modules from a modular synth, but all in one housing.  You can feed it a signal via guitar or keys or whatever, and if you’ve really got a death wish you can try to play it on its own with no input.  Also each module has a separate in and out, so you can run them in any order you please.

Module 1 (left) is an envelope filter based off of the old DOD 440.  The two controls are level and range but they might as well be florp and squawk, because that’s what the circuit does!

Module 2 (middle) is a tremolo based off of the 4MS Tremulus Lune.  It is an absolutely fantastic, if not complicated, tremolo.  Top two controls are a coarse and fine adjustment for speed, and it lets you go from a rapidly vibrating pulse all the way down to a swell every 2-3 seconds.  The other two controls are for depth and spacing.  The spacing control is particularly cool because it controls the smoothness of the pulses.  You can go from a nice, organic swell up and swell down, or can make it ultra choppy like you’re flicking a switch on and off.

Module 3 (right) is based off of Tim Escobedo’s “Ugly Face” circuit.  It is an enormous pile of shit in the best possible way.  Its *kind of* a fuzz, but gritty to an extreme, sharp, treble-y, and wildly uncontrollable.  I really dont know what I can say about it other than it’s completely terrible and insane and perfect for Bret.  What the controls do is a mystery.

 Cheech Marin Bret adorned it with a sticker and sent me a pic of it in his noise-making setup which includes, among other things, a keyboard stand.

Boners that shoot darts out of them.

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Oh heavens me.  How have I never written about the awesome funk fizzle that is the Mosrite Fuzzrite?  No clue, but here it goes.  This one was done on request for Chris Ryan (The Energy, Black Congress, Secret Prostitutes), and then I also made a sister unit for myself just to have in the shelves.   This is a clone of the OG unit, which used germanium transistors.  Apparently only like 250 of that era were ever made, so theyre rare birds, and pricey ones at that.  Oh well…clone it up.

The Fuzzrite is *odd* in topology when compared next to a lot of the other classic circuits like a fuzz face or a tone bender.  Theres a pretty standard volume control but the “fuzz” control (called “depth” on the original units) adjusts the spittle and fizz at the same time that it adjusts tone, and also kinda plays like a blend control as well.  “What the shit does all that mean, jackass?”  Well it means that fully clocked it is sharp and treble-y and fuzzy in a brittle 60’s garage kinda way.  When you back off on the control is where it gets interesting.  The tone becomes more bass-y, less fuzzy, and sounds like you’re blending into the dry signal from your guitar.  That means that the circuit plays really well with your existing distortion (amp distortion or a dirt box) and allows you to color your distortion with a bit of fuzz, but you can still hear both.  For the same reason this one sounds cool with bass as well, where you usually want less fuzz than a guitar so you dont get lost in the mix.  I built one of these for Todd Martin (Fletcher C. Johnson, The Ex-Humans) who uses it for bass and it’s always a head-turner when he clicks it on.

Good lord, thats a lot of description for 2 knobs.  Both are bright-ass orange.

"Me Mates Crisps" for $1000, Alex.

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Roight, then.  I’ve built many a booster in my time, based around a few different circuits.  Usually they go away as quick as I build them, so this was an attempt to build all of them and have one of each at my disposal.  Four different boosters in a variety of autumnal colors.  How divine.

Left to Right they are: an AMZ Mosfet Boost,  AMZ Mini Boost, Balls Boost, and a ZVEX Super Hard-On.  The AMZ Mosfet is a pretty standard mosfet boost, which behaves like cranking a tube amp.  It provides volume and a little dirt, increasing toward the far end of the dial.  The Mini Boost is configured differently and provides a not-so-clean boost.  Its basically cranked and then the volume is attenuated at the pedal output so it always gets a *little* overdriven transistor tone.  The Balls Boost (formerly blogged as the “Orange Droolius”) is a modified version of the AMZ Mosfet which behaves similarly but adds a touch more filth and some extra bass.  The ZVEX SHO is stock.

Burgers in the rue morgue.

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ProCo Rats!  They’re awesome.  You dont wanna admit that a plain old “distortion” pedal can be so cool, but fuck it is.  These are the same simple circuit as the original rat of the late seventies using a single op-amp gain stage, silicon clipping diodes, and a FET buffer on the output.  They sound shitty and gritty and the tone stack is a wild fucking mule and all of it rules.

The one in gold is for Dann Miller (Weird Party, Black Congress, and formerly The Jonbenet) and the one in copper is for my shelves, at least until a taker comes along.  One of these was my 150th pedal built, but I dont know which.  Go me.

Credit to the klippinest klop, the most practically black, Will Adams, for the post title!!!

Posted in Rat

Workin for me mates.

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This here’s a special fuzz box built for the lovely Jana Hunter of Lower Dens.  It’s a clone of a specific Big Muff from the late 70’s known as the “IC” Big Muff.  These were from a short timeframe when the muff was redisgned from its standard 4-transistor layout to one using 3 gain stages provided by two integrated circuits.  Sound like a bunch of fancy mumbo jumbo?  It is, but the point is that the shit sounds different!

These were in fact the black sheep of the Big Muff family and used to be available on the used market for prices ranging from two to four cents.  That is until Siamese Dream came out and everyone realized that they sound pretty dang kickass.  They have same scooped mids that all muffs have, but where the others have a distortion sound that’s really smooth and almost overdrive-y, this one sounds like a crushing wall of disaster.  Its super cool. 

Controls are:  Volume, Tone, Sustain (L-R)

Crampin’

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The concept for this amp is the brainchild of ScottVA over on the Weber amps forum. Its basically the initial preamp from an 18W lite, the tone stack from a 5E3 deluxe, a long-tailed-pair phase inverter, and a cathode biased power section. This one is dual KT-66s and it is a monster sounding amp clocking in somewhere under 30W. 

The idea is to keep things minimal, so the preamp is sparse, as is the iron, and it keeps the whole things pretty light. The sound out of it is amazing. Its not too gainy and has a lot of clean head room with a tele and a little bit less with a les paul.  No matter what youre playing it gets a good bit of crunch at the end of the volume dial. The cleans are VERY blackface bassman to me and that is so kickass. The crunch is straight plexi, with a bit more bassy full-ness due to the KT-66s.  Call it something between a plexi and a tweed bassman/JTM-45.  Brilliant.

Controls are Volume and Tone because you dont need anything else in life.

Party on the patio.

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This here little dude is an amp built for the uncompromisingly awesome Jordan Graber.  He needed something small just to jam around the house and I know he has an existing cabinet there, so a head was the obvious choice.  And when you’re going small and classy, its really hard to avoid the Tweed Champ circuits.  They’re just SO cool and they sound like Billy Gibbons shredding a case of Tecate.

This has Magnetic Component transformers, Mallory signal caps, NOS RCA 5Y3 Rectifier, Tung-Sol 6V6, and a JJ 12AX7.  The cabinet was built by your truly out of pine.  Shit rules.

 

Yuengling Malmsteen.

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This was built for the legendary sleeve eater, the Crampaw, as part of a drunken horse-trade for some carny-ass Ludwigs and a lifetime of hilarious jokes.  I hope you’re confused…it only gets weirder.

So I was asked to get weird with a delay pedal.  Ive built a ton of analog delays before and while they sound fantastic, they lack a certain amount of flexibility in the weirdness department.  The technology used to build them was monumental at the time it was developed, but its just limited.  To enhance the ridiculousness, I needed to go outside of the analog delay scope here so I went with the PT2399 digital delay chip.  Delays from this chip are just superb.  Not as warm and organic as from an analog setup but pretty dang good and MAN you can get some repeats! And you can do so with a lot less parts and tweaking than you need for an analog outfit.  Perfect. 

So I went with that but made two of the same circuit so that your delays can have delays.  One cascades into the other and you can get some bizarre repeat tempos when both are on.  You can also just use one or the other as you please.  Each delay is switchable via footswitch, and the large knobs control the mix for each delay.  With the knobs completely down its as if the unit was completely out of the signal chain.  This worked out well because it may be used for keys and the delays can be dialed on or off by hand while playing.  Knobs across the top are:  delay time 1, repeat length 1, delay time 2, repeat length 2.

Holy hot shit hunk of gold.

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Holy smokes, its a wah.  What does it do?  It wahs, and it is gold.  What more do you need?

Most people dont know this but much of the wah-wah pedal world uses the exact same circuit layout as the original wahs, with just some component value changes.  Because of this, the circuit is just *ripe* for tweaking the values to get different voicings, and thats exactly what this one is.  This one features some more modern features like true bypass switching, and it has been tweaked to enlarge the sweep range a bit, and also improve the bottom end.

Posted in Wah

Voltron.

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This fuckin’ thing!!

This was made on request by my buddy Johnny Pockets.  Its a five-up multi effect unit.  The goal seemed to be rooted in ridiculousness, and by god I like that.  The effects in this are (from right to left):

Fuzz Face:  a bog standard silicon transistor fuzz face.  universally awesome fuzz.

Boosters:  two (count-em) two ZVEX super hard-ons, with the trick being that one is always on, and one is switchable.  I have built that booster for a few people that immediately ask for another because they want to leave one on all the time, and switch the other one in as needed. 

Effects loop:  An effects loop in an effect pedal?  YEP.  Sometimes you need to throw some other boxes into your pedal chain, and sometimes you want em in the middle.  So I threw one in here after the dirt section but before the modulation section.  I dont know what you’d want to put in here, necessarily, but I thought a wah went damn well.

Delay:  analog delay based on the Madbean Aquaboy.  RAD sounding delay which can also do some slapback reverb if you really crank down the delay time.  Slapback reverb is kickass.

Tremolo:  using the modified EA tremolo.  a super-solid sounding trem that has the bonus of a whipass boost in it as well!  If you need a THIRD boost (who doesnt, really?) then you can crank down the trem depth and use this as a straight boost.

Phase:  bog-standard clone of the MXR Phase 45, my personal favorite phaser.