Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

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laurie
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Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by laurie » Sun Jun 12, 2022 4:03 am

G'day!

For a number of reasons (none of them bad) I find myself needing a project for a few months. I'm thinking to design a new pedal.

My current thinking is to do an improved phaser. I have ideas for a good phase-drive waveform (better than the last one I designed), plus I'd add (controllable) subtle resonance.

Anyone else have thoughts? Not looking to build anything massively complex, just something basic and easy to use, and doesn't mess with the tone.

I would do a step by step description of the design like the 32-OD.
Last edited by laurie on Sun Jun 12, 2022 5:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: A new pedal design... thoughts?

Post by Pepe » Sun Jun 12, 2022 6:58 am

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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by BearBoy » Tue Jun 14, 2022 12:11 pm

I'd be very interested to hear what you had in mind for this, Laurie. I love my LGP so would be keen to hear your plans for an improved phaser.

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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by laurie » Tue Jun 14, 2022 12:35 pm

BearBoy wrote:
Tue Jun 14, 2022 12:11 pm
I'd be very interested to hear what you had in mind for this, Laurie. I love my LGP so would be keen to hear your plans for an improved phaser.
I always felt the phase drive circuit of a phaser could be different from the "industry standard" of a triangle wave. I think it would sound better as a sine wave.

I'd also like a feedback control - normally called "resonance", however, it would add subtle character not massive "resonance".

Having a level control is useful, so the design would include that.

I'm thinking 4 knobs:
  • Depth
  • Speed
  • Character
  • Level
My previous design was physically constrained to fit inside the standard "B" size box, so there wasn't much PC board real-estate which really limited the options. A new design would go in the "BB" size box (same as the 32-OD) so it will allow more creativity and it will be much easier to assemble.

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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by Pepe » Tue Jun 14, 2022 1:11 pm

Maybe you can include a switch for the selection of triangle and sine? :idea:
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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by laurie » Tue Jun 14, 2022 3:42 pm

A possibility.

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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by sclitheroe » Wed Jun 15, 2022 12:16 am

I'm not suggesting this is in any way useful to you, but I know you're a fan of phasers (I am quite fond of them myself), so I figured you'd appreciate all things phase...who knows, maybe something in the circuit will give you ideas for some future phase related endeavour.

The idea behind this circuit is that it takes CW (morse code) signals and uses phase delay to create a spatial pseudo-stereo representation of the morse code. Why would you need this? Well, the pitch of a CW signal you hear on your radio depends on what frequency you are tuned to, plus the frequency you have your beat frequency oscillator set to - for example, if I like to listen to a 600hz CW tone, I set my BFO for 600hz, and tune exactly to whatever frequency the sender is on - that results in a 600hz tone in my ears. But, there can be many adjacent CW signals near where I'm tuned, and because I'm not tuned to their frequency, but still have my BFO at 600hz, and if i have a sufficiently wide bandwidth filter set, what I hear is one CW tone at 600hz, and others at higher or lower pitches proportional to how far off frequency I am when mixed with the BFO frequency.

So what this circuit does is basically use phase to split out tones higher and lower than ~580hz, and put them in the left and right ears. The result is some CW tones "appear" right in front of you, and the rest are spread out spatially in your ears to the left and right soundstage. It's a neat idea, and I think it works because our ears in part use phase for positional information - its definitely a more nuanced approach than just using high and low pass filters and spreading the tones out that way.

http://cq-cq.eu/DJ5IL_rt001.pdf

Sound samples here, if you scroll down to the section about the "codephaser" : http://cq-cq.eu/root.htm

I bet something like this could be done for guitar, centered on some useful guitar frequency, but I also think the effect would really only work with headphones - I'm totally guessing, but I would expect the effect would either be too subtle with two amps, or would just sound bad open air because of the two signals not being in phase. BUT..if it had some drive to it, you could swap the high and low portions of the tone left and right across the soundstage, which would be like some weird, maybe like a crazy Leslie effect? Maybe it would just sound like crap.

One other thing that struck me as odd in the circuit is that it explicitly calls for some 1% tolerance components - I haven't studied the circuit enough to understand why, although I'm guessing its because its working with a very narrow frequency band and the phasing effect needs to be dead nuts on for it to sound right in the headphones.

BTW, if you like rhythm guitar, you'd like morse code. You can get some swing going as you pound out messages, and musicians are almost invariably better at sending than not (unless your rhythm playing sucks, guilty as charged). I've worked my way up to 12 words per minute over the last couple months, which I'm fairly proud of - it's a lot of practice, I figure this is a crowd that knows what that entails :)

-Scott

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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by laurie » Wed Jun 15, 2022 1:07 am

That is definitely different... I will deep read the article.

Any thoughts other than a phaser? I'm not married to phase, just seemed like something I could do.

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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by sclitheroe » Wed Jun 15, 2022 2:07 am

laurie wrote:
Wed Jun 15, 2022 1:07 am
That is definitely different... I will deep read the article.

Any thoughts other than a phaser? I'm not married to phase, just seemed like something I could do.
Push Pull Trem..something that ducks _and_ boosts - nobody does that. Probably for good reason, it might make you sea sick listening to the swells. But I like trem in front of big, compressed dirt pedals like a muff, that's where I'd stick it, and I'd probably be your only customer haha.

How about an SG-2 derivative that just kept getting louder until you stopped and it clamped and reset? Or some kind of volume swell pedal where if you played softer than X, the volume keeps dropping below unity, and if you play above X, the volume keeps ramping up above unity. Like a super extreme dynamics pedal. Again, I don't know why you'd want it, but I'd stick it front of a muff :D

Or my old fallback..the AM driver. Tiny AM transmitter squashes your signal into 10khz of dynamic range, and does an AM broadcast into a dummy load, with the output being a tuner (that you could detune) that uses the same dummy load (or an antenna next to it, since even a dummy load radiates) for the detector..hell you could probably make the tune side a diode detector (ie. a crystal radio) into a gain stage for output buffering. Again, I'd be your only customer. But having your $2k amp sound like a cheap transistor radio cranking out old time tunes would be sweet. I also think its totally unworkable, an AM transmitter is actually a fairly involved circuit, you need compression and stuff to squish down the signal and avoid overmodulation, I have a kit here for a AM transmitter I haven't built yet, and it has a surprising number of parts. Someone needs to do a DSP simulation of this, that would be good enough.

Honestly, I think we all like your phaser, next gen design would be fun. Don't listen to my other ideas, the last two years have not been kind to my mental health. :D

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Re: Thinking of doing a new pedal design... what are your thoughts about what it should be?

Post by The_Doc » Wed Jun 15, 2022 7:49 am

I have a real soft spot for treble boosters. How about a Laurie take on one ? Maybe combine it with an overdrive of some sort.

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