Messages

Revive the soapbox!
I'm sick and tired of those brainless websites that flood the Internet with ChatGPT-generated content.
"Are you looking for the guitar related tone source? Let's talk about the potentiometer shaft!"
Idiotic phrasing like that gives these sites away, in addition to thier 34 IQ information and stupid web address names. This garbage should be cleaned up / banned / relegated somehow. The real question is:  what possible purpose or advantage does somebody recieve from making these sites? It just clogs up being able to find the 5% of actual relative sites.

The site is just a substrate for ads. Google can serve you ads when you search and the site can serve you ads when you visit their page. It's only worth it as long as LLMs are cheap to use. The "growth at all costs" phase of AI is due to end in the next couple of years. Either a winner (monopoly) will arise and they can start squeezing customers, or the venture capital will dry up and company valuations will drop accordingly. If we're lucky, they won't cause a market crash...or maybe the market is already crashing and it's being masked by all the imaginary money tech companies are throwing around at AI.

Awesome. Gotta like a pedal with a Throb toggle!

There's your band name, Throb Toggle.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Sounds more like the fine print on a little blue pill. "If your throb toggle stays in the 'on' position for more than four hours, please contact your doctor."

[edit: spelling]

[Throb]

The Weeble is my take on Tim Escobedo's Wobbletron, a true phase vibrato. Phase vibrato has a depth and dimensionality that I don't hear in delay based vibratos. Because the amount of pitch bending is frequency dependent, where you play on the neck, pickup selection, and tone controls can all effect the depth and quality of the vibrato.



I used "sea breeze" for the enclosure color and a Japanese wave theme for the pattern.



I used through-hole JFETs because I had them, but the PCB will accommodate surface mount as well.



I've added a second phase stage which allows for extra depth as well as more vibrato at slower speeds. The LFO is left unchanged other than allowing half the minimum speed of the Wobbletron because it's already giving about as much as it can. The capacitors in the all-pass stages really do make a difference in the tone of the effect. With Throb and Chop off, you get a magnatone kind of sound simillar Tim's design, but with much more depth available and the option for going half as fast. Throb changes the knee frequency of the first all-pass filter. When engaged, it can get a little into Univibe territory. Chop changes the knee frequency of the second all-pass filter. This is more dramatic a change than the Throb control and almost sounds like tremolo at faster settings. The first half of the Depth control provides a smooth warble. Beyond that, it starts to get choppy at most speeds.

Despite being close to unity gain, this is not a high-headroom effect. Sending the signal through two JFETs limits the dynamic range. For most guitar signals, this shouldn't be an issue, but this won't handle a proper line level output. That said, when it does saturate, it's pleasing; it sounds like a cat purring. Overall, I'm pleased with the range of wobbly sounds this circuit makes.

Here's a demo:

As always, if anyone would like to build this, I have extra PCBs. Just DM me.

[Noise]

Cool! I actually took that topology from the PT2399 datasheet. The first adjustable version a ever saw was the Noise control of the Hamlet delay.

A buffer is usually the most elegant solution to impedance mismatches, but it's not the only one. You can just passively split a signal, but it tends to cause problems. In the case of a ToneBender that wants to see the pickups, the extra loading might actually be a good thing. You may find that you have to tweak values in the input stage of the ToneBender to get it sounding right with the SHO in parallel.

You could also try using a simple BJT boost with low fixed gain, (maybe 6dB?) followed by series resistance. This would isolate the pickup so that it would see a consistent input impedance. The series resistor will bring the gain back down to unity and also raise the impedance that the TB is seeing back to passive pickup levels (if you get the values dialed in right).

You could also get even more fancy and use an inductor-based pickup simulator.

Looks great! What kind of filter topology did you end up using?

This video came out a while ago about poisoning AI crawling YouTube with fake (invisible) subtitles. Maybe something similar could be done with HTML comments?

Wow! It looks like it actually compresses!

This sounds like it has the potential to scratch the itch the ESR Graphic Fuzz left me with. Very cool!

That's an interesting comparison: they both have the resonances/filter thing happening, but the ESR is highly interactive with the pickups; Hans doesn't care what you put in front of it—it's going to get turned into a square wave!

A wider strap will also distribute the weight more. I think most straps are 2" wide. If you can find a 3" or 4" strap (maybe marketed to bassists?) that's a 33% or 50% reduction in force on your shoulder! Also suede or leather is less likely to slide, which could make it easier to keep the guitar at your preferred angle.

Probably?

If I'm reading this correctly, you've got a partial rectifier that's being used to send control voltage to a voltage controlled resistor. You could probably get away with replacing the whole IC with a high gain BJT. you might have to twerk some values to get it to work optimally.

This is really cool. Congrats.
Ive been messing with comparators recently.
With this kinda application, is it right that its always super high gain? Any way to tame that?

All opamps are designed for super high gain. You can tame the gain with negative feedback, but then you have a regular opamp circuit and not a comparator.

That finish looks fantastic! Sounds great, too.

Thanks! It's seaside, ocean mist, pistachio, and grape over a black powder coat.

Clever Hans is the big brother of the One Chip Pony. It's based on the same comparator engine, but the added EQ options make it much more versatile—truly a horse of a different color!



I'm still looking for a way to label controls with hydrodip finishes. With simple layouts, labels aren't necessary, though



I'm loving ribbon cables lately. I'd love to use another ribbon cable and I/O board for the jacks, but I havn't found a PCB compatible DC jack that will accept and external nut.



The input stage is a mosfet boost with a heavy low-pass filter. This filter helps minimize string noise when the Gate is set high. This stage feeds the comparator. The comparator doesn't distort like most fuzzes. Instead of amplifying the signal until it clips, the signal is compared to the bias voltage. If the input is lower, the outup shoots up to the upper rail. If the input is higher, the output is slammed to ground. It's maximum fuzz and maximum compression all the time! The comparator then hits the EQ section. Contour is a simple input capacitor blend, but it's very effective. The Filter control is a multi-feedback low pass filter. This is actually similar to the filtering that a lot of PT2399 delay circuits use. This filter creates a resonant peak at the cut-off frequency of roughly 3–6dB. That peak keeps the signal from getting muddy, even with heavy treble attenuation.

The result is a powerful fuzz—with essentially no noise floor—that you can EQ to sit just right in a mix.

Here's a demo:

As always, I have extra PCBs. If you're interested, just DM me!