Im thinking about building it. Sounds good on the runoffgroove site. Has anyone built yet. Sounds like an autowah witha more pronounces quack to it.
It works well,....under tightly controlled conditions, which is to say some guitars work better(Strat) with it than others(Les Paul), it must come first in the chain & not have anything buffered or otherwise(forget about a wireless) in front of it cause it won't work then. It also doesn't seem to like my mosfet booster after it sometimes(going into a strange feedback sound, I don't know which pedal it's coming from, it just happens when there both on). I still enjoy it though. I put the input buffer from the Dr. Quack in front of mine though I don't know if it helped or hurt it. Also fast flurries of notes tend to leave the tracking in the dust. Oh well, I'm a bastard! Build it anyway!!
Regards
RDV
Filters of this type are inherently fussy/picky/temperamental and the complete anithesis of a set-and-forget effect. One of the many reasons why they tend not to be as popular as they might be: they require a smarter and more patient and strategic musician.
The Nurse represents a reasonable compromise between the original stock Dr. Q and the Dr. Quack. In terms of avoiding a number of interfacing issues, the Quack is really the smarter build, though and recommended from where I stand. All three, however, really come into their own when you start to mod them with additional controls for tinkering with the filter or the envelope follower properties. Stock is fine. Modded is more fun.
As for flurries of notes confusing it, well that is pretty much true of most envelope-controlled filters since the majority use very basic envelope followers that cannot track quickly unless you are willing to tolerate audio ugliness.
I had her setup with [I wish I could remember and tried reproducing it] a Fuzz and Or booster, and was getting a great "Kwouneer] Fuzzquack from it. 'K' representing the initail attack 'oun' the vocal inflection of the Env.filter sweep, and 'eer' being the harmonic it tended to settle into at the sustain part of the note.
I thought the way to do it is find just such settings, and build that whole galoop into one boxed, bypassable unit [Fuzz, Booster...what have you that get's the cool tone you like]. and use this as 1rst or 2nd string Fuzz...
A soon as I added or subtracted anything before the NQ ckt. the NQuacky [pots] neede to be re-tweaked again.