Hey all,
I have an interesting thought for an effect. It's not a distortion in the typical sense of the word, but...
An optical distortion pedal. It would have to be digital, of course. Something to the extent of:
Source signal input >>> multi-stage bandpass to break source signal into signal bands... maybe 6? >>> ADC >>> led array >>> light filter (colored? this will produce an attenuation on the signal bands) >>> photodiode/phototransistor >>> perhaps a second transistor stage for distortion? >>> DAC >>> recombination >>> perhaps a third tran stage? >>> output.
This is a very developable project! Let's discuss your ideas, see if we can make this thing work.
Ciao
Something occured to me. Perhaps different colored light filters to produce various amounts of attenuation before the signal bands are recombined.
Hmmm... Why do you want it to be digital?
Also... If you are going to digitize the signal why do you want to do the dividing and combining in the analog side? You would need 6 ADC's and 6DAC's for that.
One more, A clipping stage would not do too much to digital signal (since it is allredy square wave)... Or do you mean some kind of simulation? Why not do that on the analog side?
hehe it's fun aye? you've got the bug :P
don't worry, people post weird and wonderful design ideas here all the time... after building a few things you start thinking more realistically. sure, that thingy is possible, and who knows - maybe it sounds great.
but i sure don't have the patience to design a PCB for it, and debugging it on veroboard would be a pain, and getting filters with sharp enough slopes to seperate into 6 bands requires lots of components X6, and basically when you're done you'll have so many goddam knobs on it you'll never want to turn it on ;)
but if you're really keen to do it, breadboard it up and there's loads of help here for specific problems!
I have heard of such a thing as optical distortion, but I'm not completely sure of how it is accomplished.
For your idea, I'm not sure I fully understand where the distortion comes from. It sounds more like a complicated filtering set-up.
2 Ideas that come to mind with light filters (this would be very expensive to buitld):
Set up an array of comparators like would be seen in an AD converter to get 2^16 signal levels, like a 16-bit ADC.
Instead of encoding these 2^16 signal levels into a digital signal, send them each individually through an array of 2^16 LED's.
A "distortion" type nonlinearity can be accomplished by optically attenuating each path with optical filters to taste, then receive each optical signal via phototransistor on the other side and send the signal into a weighted summing amplifier, then output....
just to get a clue to the cost of this:
2^16 = 65,536
so the modulating LEDs alone would cost:
$19,660
This little old pedal could cost you nearly a quarter of a million to build...
I don't have that kind of cash:
the $1.00 solution is to built a fuzz face with optocouplers or something.
how exciting is that? At least you could have an optical "fuzz" control via light filter.