Super-Freq » Uncategorized

New Guitar

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:59:44 +0000

Sometimes you have to buy a new guitar. Sometimes you just give in. I saw this and was inspired. Not sure why, it does have a unique look. I figured the expense was not justified. After thinking about this for a week, I came up with the idea to hawk some old junk on ebay. Which in the end worked well.

I had not bought an Agile guitar before. I had heard good things about them. They get high reviews on the internet. I have to say this instrument lives up to the hype. It’s well built and plays great. Overall the instrument looks great. There are a few tiny flaws in the finish, you need to really look to find these.

A few features I like. Single pickup single control strips everything down to the bare bones. The plain top with out a lot of clutter has a nice unique style. The pick up is a P90 style. I don’t own a guitar with one of these so it adds a new sound. The pick sounds good. Its’ got some “twang” that you don’t get with humbuckers.

Paul Falstad’s Circuit Sim

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:06:25 +0000

If you are into making things with electronics you probably need to test them out from time to time. Paul Falstad has a really great on line circuit simulation app. It’s a Java applet.

Try it out here: http://falstad.com/circuit/

Here’s a picture of a Fuzz Face I mocked up. Notice the scope at the bottom. The scope on the left is the output and the scope on the right is the input, a 40hz sine wave. Hmmm, no distortion have check the values again.

JKowalski posted a nice tutorial on this over at the DIYStompbox forum, here.

Bee Baa

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 04:26:42 +0000

This is a Roland Bee Baa Fuzz. It’s sort of a booster followed by a two transistor silicon fuzz. The sounds is pretty heavy and doom like. Interpret that how you will. The original came in a larger case with three stomp switches on top, bypass, boost, tone. I used stomp switches for the boost and bypass, and use a toggle for the tone switch.

I built this from the GEOFEX layout. The mighty roar of this pedal demanded more than than puny plastic standoffs could hold. Wussy adhesive backing would not be enough. I chose to go with 440 allen bolts and aluminum standoffs to secure the PCB to the enclosure.

Stompbox Cookbook PCB layouts are BACKWARDS!

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:58:59 +0000

I just started building up a project and I realized the PCB layout I printed from the Stompbox Cookbook is backwards! Beware if you plan to build a project from any of these layouts.

I think I can save my build by either bending the IC pins over so the chips are upside down, or soldering the chips to the copper side of the board.

Compressor thing

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 16:17:48 +0000

Here’s a my take on the LED compressor thing. Really this is just a “mash up” of mictester’s “Really Cheap Compressor and the John Hollis Flatline compressor. You could look at this as the Flatline with a simplified LED driver. Or, the Really Cheap Compressor with a non-inverting amplifier stage.

This hasn’t been tested. It was made more of an exercise.

Tremolo-matic X redux

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:04:48 +0000

After playing around with this for a while I find reducing the gain on the input stage seems to get rid of the harsh noise from a hot input. Not sure if this will work for every circumstance, but it did work for my guitar.

To make up for the reduced output I modified the output buffer. This also made for a better effect in my opinion. I feel the trem sounds better when unity gains falls in the middle of the trem sweep.

Here’s a few notes. Part numbers follow the original schematic from Stompboxology.

R14 was 470K. Make this 309K (or there about). Lowers the input gain
and clears up a lot of nasty distortion that shows up when the input
is high.

R16 was 3K3. Just remove this, or replace it with something really
large ~1M. This increases the gain at the output. Which makes up for
the gain lost by the first change and gives it a little extra gain for
a better tremolo effect.

R25 was 25K. Make this 100K. This decreases the lower end of the rate.
I like the slow tremolo sound. I’d almost like to make this a little
larger. But it might require a weird size pot 120K, 150K, 200K etc.
You can fiddle with C15 also, but this tinkers with the fast rate
which I like.

I had an idea to build another with a switchable rate cap for super
fast audio rate modulation and regular low frequency modulation. The
HF modulation might give a weird sort of “ring moddy” tone.

Casualty 4 Phaser working

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 23:16:08 +0000

Here’s an image of the Casualty 4 Phaser. Wired everything up. After figuring out that I had forgotten to connect the ground wire from the jacks to the board everything seems to be working. Initial observations. The Shape pot seems to do nothing. The Width pot seems shape the soft triangle into a trapezoidial square wave. The phase sound is pretty rich. Need to test some more…

FM Modulator

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:35:22 +0000

Here’s another interesting snippet from the Stompbox Cookbook. I was not able to get this to work. Who knows what went on in the mind of Mr. Boscorelli?

Looks like the guitar signal is meant to modulate the frequency of the 7555 via pin 5. The 7555 then drives the 567, a phase lock loop, which tries to lock on to the signal.

The left half of this scan got cut off. If anyone is interested I’ll post the rest. I think there is just a volume pot.

Here’s a link to some info on the 567:http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/electron/elect12.htm

Batteries or no batteries?

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:54:02 +0000

I’ve run into a few project lately, Casualty 4 and Sunking, that fit in a B sized box, but leave no room for a battery. This has me rethinking the battery as a power source. To be honest I use batteries almost exclusively. I rarely use a power supply. The reason, I don’t own a decent power supply. I have a single 9v wall wart from RS. Which works fine but has a terrible ripple.
I do admit I also throw away a lot of batteries. It would be nice to not be producing the extra waste.
It would also be nice to not have to buy batteries. 9V batteries are fairly expensive. I look around and can find them for about a buck. Though, a few weeks ago I bought two at this dollar store on Divisadero St. and they were both dead when I opened the package!
What do people expect when they buy an effect? Do you expect it to use batteries and a power supply? How do people feel about effects that don’t have the battery option?

Sunking

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:46:37 +0000

Not sure if this is Sunking or Sun King. Either way it’s clone of the Klon Centaur. That apparently fits into a B sized box. Hats off to MadBean for making that happen.
I way have to give this one a try. Here’s a link:
http://www.freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6392&start=40