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DIY Stompboxes => Building your own stompbox => Topic started by: dj_death on December 29, 2003, 04:29:22 PM

Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: dj_death on December 29, 2003, 04:29:22 PM
Hi guys i built the DH Pitch Shifter at General Guitar Gadjets and i get lots of noise when i play chords hard. Except this it works well, i checked all voltages and everything seems ok. I also checked the circuit with the audio probe and i saw that there was noise even at HT8950's output (pin9). Any suggestions?
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: Samuel on December 29, 2003, 04:38:54 PM
How about noise coming out of one or both of the opamp stages? Maybe you could dial back the opamp gain a bit?
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: Paul Perry (Frostwave) on December 29, 2003, 07:49:54 PM
What kind of "noise" is it? might be overloading, clipping.
Opamp noise isn't dependant on the signal type or level, but clipping or intermodulation artifacts are.
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: gez on December 30, 2003, 04:30:56 AM
Quote from: Paul Perry (Frostwave)What kind of "noise" is it? might be overloading, clipping.
Highly likely with this chip as there isn't much headroom from 3V!
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: smoguzbenjamin on December 30, 2003, 06:36:21 AM
Whaddaya mean 3V? Looks like it all plugs into 9v... :?
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: gez on December 30, 2003, 09:22:53 AM
Quote from: smoguzbenjaminWhaddaya mean 3V? Looks like it all plugs into 9v... :?

Take a closer look and you'll see 3.6V zeners providing the bias.  The  HT8950 chip can only handle a ABSOLUTE max of 5.5V.  The recommended range is 2.4 - 4V.
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: Samuel on December 30, 2003, 02:32:50 PM
Yeah I think the typical supply is about +/- 3.5 V
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: rocket on December 31, 2003, 10:21:23 AM
i think you should add a compander like it's used in analog delays or the pt80  digital delay, plenty of suitable schematics are around
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: rocket on December 31, 2003, 10:24:15 AM
i think you should add a compander like it's used in analog delays or the pt80  digital delay, plenty of suitable schematics are around
Title: DH Pitch Shifter
Post by: dj_death on December 31, 2003, 06:54:21 PM
Thank you for responding. I don't know how to describe this sound, but it is really annoying maybe it's clipping because it happens when i hit hard chordsand notes. I checked with the audio probe the output of the first opamp that is feeding the HT8950 with signal and it's crystal clean. The only strange thing that i noticed is that although i use 3.6V zeners for
the power supply i get +/- 4.1V. Do you think the 4.1V makes the chip to work bad? And something else i can't hear any real difference between robot and vibrato mode.