Category Archives: Tremolo

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.

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.