Tim's Ugly Face

[ragtime8922]

I built this on my test jig (Breadboard/wrapper) and I love it. I was, however, wondering if anyone knew how to tame this thing a bit. Even when the volume knob on the guitar is off the pedal makes an adjustible, loud tone. It's real cool when playing though. Also, does anyone know of a fuzz project that has the same type of abrupt, staticy decay?

[lightningfingers]

try hollis's crash sync, it is is a similar sounding circuit, has wayy less current consumtion and can be easily modded for the same kind of env. control

[Dan N]

Tim's PWM decays rether abruptly.

The Rattle Crow is a fun build and has a weezing donkey decay whose duration is set by a knob.

[jmusser]

I must know where to find this "Rattle Crow"  with the wheezing donkey effect. It just sounds so funny that I'd have to make it.

[Dan N]

"wheezing donkey" was written before coffie. Stuttering chirp is probably more accurate?

http://www.moosapotamus.com/dirtybird/dirtybird.htm

Very fun noisemaker!

[snorky]

On the UglyFace, you should be able to roll the threshhold pot down to where it's not oscillating (making noise all the time), no?

- Mark

[Tim Escobedo]

It's possible for there to be oscillator signal bleeding through when the effect is bypassed. Generally, if the Threshold control is set to gate rather than free oscillate, this won't be a problem.

Another possibility. If the guitar volume contol is rolled back, it's possible that  there's some hum signal that's triggering the Uglyface.

Current consumption isn't too bad with the Uglyface. Using a JRC386D, it's about 5mA or less in quiescent mode. However, that can jump significantly higher when driving a LED in the optoisolator. This would be a same issue with a Crash Sync. Ad if you use a regular 555 in the Crash Sync, quiescent current consumption is likely to be over 10mA.

The Uglyface and PWM are gated fuzzes. That is, they are extremely nonlinear, only changing state when the input AC voltage reaches a specific threshold value. The gate the signal in addition to fuzzing it up. There's really no way around this. I may be possible to devise a simple envelope generator or follower and apply it to control the amplitude of the output signal. However, this adds very significant complexity and would probably result in less apparent sustain since the envelope would need to fade out before sputtering out if the object is to have more "natural" sounding dynamics.

[jmusser]

Tim, did you get a chance to read about the Octup build I did? We were beating around that my weirdness was due to the wide tolerances I used on the 1 meg resistors. I have the Gargletron bagged up and ready to build. I'm looking forward to that one, since I have nothing else built that sounds like that.