BJFE / BearFoot fx Guitar Effects Community

Hey Bjorn!

What was the first pedal you designed? I'm guessing something pre-dated the Baby Blue? What first inspired you to make pedals?

EJ

Hi,

Oh the first pedal I built?As in complete and portable?

I guess that would be a distortion. I remember listening closely to a highpass filter to find the balance I wanted across the neck of the guitar. I found something that worked with also the resistive loading I wanted and it came out at 173Hz.......

Oh yes, I looked at the cap I had used: a polypropylen axial 1n8-something I had bought from the technician of Hepstars and also the local radiorepairguy, that I years later learnt sold the parts for the first fuzzbox built in Swedenby a jazz drummer.........

Ah, I wondered if the capacitor had something magical........I was sixteen or seventeen and building this distortionpedal using an OP amp on a piece of perfboard, because that was the one thing I needed to transport a sound............pertinax cracks easily hehe

Ah it was fun,and it started perhaps an urge to know if there really was any magic and today I'd think if there was magic it could be explained as a happy coincidence or in a model.

Later came this with that sound changes with powerlevels and some amps have funny filtering to make a bright 'clean' sound but amplifying ranges that could never be heard with just a guitar as energy would not be sufficient while energy certainly would be sufficient with a fuzzbox.

Hm, I wasn't playing spaghetti western either at the time;)
Anybody know a little piece of spaghetti I could pick up and learn for demoes?

Come to think of it filtering would be called for........now how do filters work?
Ah, perhaps best to define precisely what needs to be removed and remove it and then explain why it would work.

The first pedal I made on order was a tremolo for a guy that wanted to not have to drag a Music Man amp along with his Marshall halfstack just for tremolo on one song.

I made in that a differential stage with J-Fets and a Sinewave oscillator- this was crude and could have been easily made with tubes, but voltages and currents needed would require a rather big box and suitable batteries would be a bit heavy and bulky- besides this was to fit a guitar case......ohwell, there's got to be a way......

It took two days of intense reading for me grasp the chemical reaction inside a transistor.
The only thing I knew of chemistry before that was how to mix beautiful colours that were both explosive and poisionous ............they were so beautiful yet so dangerous......

Have fun
BJ

BJF wrote:The first pedal I made on order was a tremolo for a guy that wanted to not have to drag a Music Man amp along with his Marshall halfstack just for tremolo on one song.

This tremolo:

mrpicard wrote:

BJF wrote:The first pedal I made on order was a tremolo for a guy that wanted to not have to drag a Music Man amp along with his Marshall halfstack just for tremolo on one song.

This tremolo:

Hi,

Ah well that particurlar tremolo I originally built to use as a sign for my workshop and yes it's a working unit using a similar circuit to Saffron Yellow Tremolo.

The first tremolo I built though used a different circuit- something I easily could have buitl with tubes: a differiental stage one side working as amplifier and the other as oscillator input and that being fed by a phaseshift oscillator

Here are some thoughts I wrote for another forum but related and I don't think I'll post it elsewhere:
The oscillators used in Fender amps such as blackface,silverface,tweed are all phaseshift types that produce sinewave and so are the oscillator used in Shaller Tremolo et.c.
However on blackface and silverface Fenders the lamp driver may or may not have sinewave on the cathode but can have one side hardclipped. The photocell can only vary with a sinewave in a defined range of light and now when exposed to light outside the span the photocell is saturated for a short duration.
This means that the photocell may vary with a complex waveform in the mentioned amps depending on the workingpoint of the lampdriver.Also when the waveform is clipped a ticking sound will be heard through the audiopath since then the drawn current is reflected onto the powersupply or B+.
Setting the lampdriver for a clean sinewave greatly reduces the level of the ticking and also a more seemless tremoloeffect.Now as the workingpoint for the stage feeding the tremolocoupler (photocell) is directly affected by the sway of the photocell and also due to the load of the Depth control allready would be set quite sharply the tremolo effect may still sound hard, while this can be change by isolating the photocell and connecting the depth control in series with the photocell, such as would be done in many Gibson amplifiers.

The most enchanting tremolo I have ever heard came from a Premier amplifier that had a phaseshiftoscillator driving a balanced differential stage so the carrierwave was near fully cancelled from the audiopath, which left no audiable clue that the tremolo was on but only heard when you played through the amplifier..........

That a difference in trianglewave or sinewave modulated tremoloes can be heard I would personally think would be true while it is also felt in how the modulation interacts with played notes.

Now squarewave is on/off like you can do on a Les Paul or similar using the pick up toggle.......

Tremolo though can be such that it crabs your shoulders and shakes you......

Actually I thought a lot about tremolo as it was one of the first effects I was asked to build and also a common effect on many amps I played back then and I thought then how this effect could be incorporated and possibly more useful than just for obvious on/off and what would make me like the effect.............


Have great fun
BJ