Burst box. I use it at every gig ;)
Burst box. I use it at every gig ;)
Couldn't find much on the Burst Box....
Hey guys, I'd like to make a simple little timer circuit that could turn a signal off and on while I press down on a momentary footswitch to create Killswitch stutter and Tremolo effects...Maybe just 1 Pot to control the speed or rate of the signal being cut off, and an LED to show the speed of the signal going on and off....I know there's a few pedals out there that do this kind of thing already, like the Perfect Square Hyperslicer, and Idiotbox Mad Doctor to name a couple, but it seems like it should be something very simple, afterall it's just something turning the signal off and on at slow to fast speeds...Does anyone here know a simple way or a simple circuit that I could implement to make this effect myself?...It seems like something simple that can be done with a 555 Timer chip, or am I wrong?....Any help would be great guys, thanks.
Hey guys, I'd like to make a simple little timer circuit that could turn a signal off and on while I press down on a momentary footswitch to create Killswitch stutter and Tremolo effects...Maybe just 1 Pot to control the speed or rate of the signal being cut off, and an LED to show the speed of the signal going on and off....I know there's a few pedals out there that do this kind of thing already, like the Perfect Square Hyperslicer, and Idiotbox Mad Doctor to name a couple, but it seems like it should be something very simple, afterall it's just something turning the signal off and on at slow to fast speeds...Does anyone here know a simple way or a simple circuit that I could implement to make this effect myself?...It seems like something simple that can be done with a 555 Timer chip, or am I wrong?....Any help would be great guys, thanks.
Yes the 555 would be a nice fit.
Problem with square LFOs is that they produce sharp transients on the power rail, which can easily turn into noise clicks on the audio path. And a hard mute on the audio can make an annoying pop
You will need to work around those issues:
- a clean and separate current and ground routing
- a linear ramping up and down of the audio signal. Short to look like a square mute, but long enough to not make audible "thumps"..
http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k46/jasonmatthew911/Cyclops_Inside.png
After playing with 555s I don't recommend them at all, but to answer your earlier question about how to deal with the audio path, you would use the 555 as an LFO to drive the LED side of your vactrol. Two problems with this approach:
1) As mentioned before, the 555 would drive the vactrol, but you might have a hard time trying to get the signal going through the LDR side of the vactol to be the same volume as the bypassed signal when you press the momentary foot switch.
2) To fix #1, you could use a little preamp circuit to adjust the stutter volume, but now you'd be sharing a ground with the 555 and it's VERY difficult eliminate the popping of the 555.
My recommendation is to get in touch with Jon Patton (Midwayfair) and ask him which LFO he'd recommend. He has at least one simple LFO that doesn't use a 555. You could just use the rate pot and use fixed resistors for the depth and wet/dry controls. As for the footswitch, just use a momentary switch instead of a latching one, and wire it the same as you would any other bypass switch.
I just thought of an option to deal with the volume difference between on and bypass states. Intead of using a bypass switch, use a momentary DPDT on the LED side of the vactrol to select between the LFO output and an uninterrupted voltage from your power supply. The guitar signal would always be routed through the LDR. The LED would either stutter when the LFO is powering it, or it would be lit constantly when the switch selects straight power. This option allows you to have two separate grounds and would probably eliminate the popping issue. You might still want to use a CMOS 555 to suppress the noise even further.
The downside of this option is that having your guitar signal always going through the LDR might negatively impact your tone. Also, you might still have popping problems if other pedals are fed from the same power supply as this pedal.
If you get this going, you'd do us all a huge favor if you would name it the Burst Box. The Burst Box is a mythical effect that at least one person believes exists, sort of like the Yeti. It would be good to have a real pedal with this name. See this thread for a laugh when you have some time: http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=76932.0 (http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=76932.0)
you could do as simple as this:
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=99839.0
on the tremolo part, thats a "brute force" attenuator, bad design and unpredictable interaction, but seems like its what you are asking for.
It can be done into many degrees of better, we have already sahred some hints and experience
What happens when the OD pedals are in bypass mode? Do you still lose the chopping action?
Edit:
Are you using the same power supply (i.e., with the same power ground) for your TT and your other pedals? If so, try running the TT with a 9V battery and the other pedals with the power supply and see what happens.
Ok, I've got a couple of drawings which hopefully represent most of what you've got.
The TT first:
(http://i1160.photobucket.com/albums/q485/jdansti/222794E1-A216-45D2-A88E-FE22C3C645F0-4310-0000062105127B57.jpg)
The fuzz first:
(http://i1160.photobucket.com/albums/q485/jdansti/6758F34B-52FE-4D6A-B9A2-4D2F5CC52290-4310-00000620FEADB960.jpg)
If the TT's LDR is not grounded to the same "ground" as the main signal, this might be why it's not chopping when it's placed behind another effect. But if that's the case, how is the signal ground making it to the amp? The only way that I can see this happening is if the power ground is providing the path through the effects. But if thats true, then it wouldn't chop at all when it's in the lead position... But...:)
The drawings are probably not exactly what you have, but maybe they'll help if we make them the same as your conditions.
From recollection, the Tiny trem works only on high Z sources...as soon as you put an effect inline (in front), your signal then becomes Low Z & it's effect is somewhat nulled.
There must be a simple way to change this, right?...Because I noticed that the Idiotbox Cyclops Mono stutter is a circuit based on the simple 555/LDR/LED combo and I saw many demo videos where the idiotbox Cyclops and Mad Doctor Stutter were placed after other effects and it still chops the signal very well.
From recollection, the Tiny trem works only on high Z sources...as soon as you put an effect inline (in front), your signal then becomes Low Z & it's effect is somewhat nulled.
There must be a simple way to change this, right?...Because I noticed that the Idiotbox Cyclops Mono stutter is a circuit based on the simple 555/LDR/LED combo and I saw many demo videos where the idiotbox Cyclops and Mad Doctor Stutter were placed after other effects and it still chops the signal very well.
From recollection, the Tiny trem works only on high Z sources...as soon as you put an effect inline (in front), your signal then becomes Low Z & it's effect is somewhat nulled.
There must be a simple way to change this, right?...Because I noticed that the Idiotbox Cyclops Mono stutter is a circuit based on the simple 555/LDR/LED combo and I saw many demo videos where the idiotbox Cyclops and Mad Doctor Stutter were placed after other effects and it still chops the signal very well.
yes, put a buffer to achieve a known impedance for the following stages
From recollection, the Tiny trem works only on high Z sources...as soon as you put an effect inline (in front), your signal then becomes Low Z & it's effect is somewhat nulled.
There must be a simple way to change this, right?...Because I noticed that the Idiotbox Cyclops Mono stutter is a circuit based on the simple 555/LDR/LED combo and I saw many demo videos where the idiotbox Cyclops and Mad Doctor Stutter were placed after other effects and it still chops the signal very well.
yes, put a buffer to achieve a known impedance for the following stages
Also weird that the TT works fine as the first effect going into others, it still chops the signal, but anything ON before the TT just bypasses the TT...
Also weird that the TT works fine as the first effect going into others, it still chops the signal, but anything ON before the TT just bypasses the TT...
It's not so weird ....your guitar signal is high impedance & the tiny trem can 'drag it down' with its modest LDR (i.e. shine light on the LDR its resistance goes low & loads the guitar signal), whereas the same LDR in that configuration can't drag down a signal coming out an active device (opamp etc)
http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k46/jasonmatthew911/Cyclops_Inside.png
From recollection, the Tiny trem works only on high Z sources...as soon as you put an effect inline (in front), your signal then becomes Low Z & it's effect is somewhat nulled.
There must be a simple way to change this, right?...Because I noticed that the Idiotbox Cyclops Mono stutter is a circuit based on the simple 555/LDR/LED combo and I saw many demo videos where the idiotbox Cyclops and Mad Doctor Stutter were placed after other effects and it still chops the signal very well.
yes, put a buffer to achieve a known impedance for the following stages
If you put a buffer in front of the tiny tremolo, that won't work as it'll make the High Z guitar signal, a low Z signal (which is the actual issue here ...i.e. putting an effect pedal before the tiny tremolo essentially makes your guitar's signal signal Low Z)...putting a buffer in front of the tiny tremolo would would then need a circuit re-design to make it work ...but then it wouldn't be the tiny tremolo - e.g. check out the component count of the tremolo SD posted a couple of posts above (& I dare say "The not so tiny tremolo" hasn't quite the same appeal!)
http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k46/jasonmatthew911/Cyclops_Inside.png
true, but a known impedance makes a reliable function of the LDR (recalculating values), and lower output impedance will play well with the rest of the chain.
a simple hack would be adding an inpur resistor, to make more like a pot: the combined resistor and LDR, and the wiper on the middle junction
A sufficiently big resistor (100k .. 1Meg...) would make any precedent impedance negligible, but... it wont swing to full volume, and following impedance will make less volume indeed when paralelled. Now the problem would be dealing with a high output Z
Should this be in the Tiny Tremolo thread? haha
I finally ended up breadboarding the Tiny Trem circuit and it seems to be working as intended, as long as I use it by itself or in front of other pedals as the first effect in the signal chain...As soon as I connect an overdrive or fuzz before the tiny trem, it seems like the Tiny Trem circuit gets completely ignored, like it gets bypassed or something, cuz you won't even hear the clicking sound in the background...To me it seems like when my distorted signal gets to the input of the LDR it just goes right through the output unaffected by the LDR/LED/555 circuit, since the input and output are connected to the same leg of the LDR on my breadboard...I have no dpdt switch connected at the moment...I'm doing all testing by connecting my overdrive pedals directly into the Breadboarded Tiny Trem circuit...This behavior makes no sense to me, as I've seen this type of effect connected after most pedals and the stuttering is very noticeable on any effect before this, as it should be turning all other effects on and off that are before it...This kind of effect should work best around the end of the signal chain, but right now for me it's only working as the first effect in the signal chain.....Does anyone have an idea why this is happening or what my issue is?
Should this be in the Tiny Tremolo thread? haha
Well you started it...!!I finally ended up breadboarding the Tiny Trem circuit and it seems to be working as intended, as long as I use it by itself or in front of other pedals as the first effect in the signal chain...As soon as I connect an overdrive or fuzz before the tiny trem, it seems like the Tiny Trem circuit gets completely ignored, like it gets bypassed or something, cuz you won't even hear the clicking sound in the background...To me it seems like when my distorted signal gets to the input of the LDR it just goes right through the output unaffected by the LDR/LED/555 circuit, since the input and output are connected to the same leg of the LDR on my breadboard...I have no dpdt switch connected at the moment...I'm doing all testing by connecting my overdrive pedals directly into the Breadboarded Tiny Trem circuit...This behavior makes no sense to me, as I've seen this type of effect connected after most pedals and the stuttering is very noticeable on any effect before this, as it should be turning all other effects on and off that are before it...This kind of effect should work best around the end of the signal chain, but right now for me it's only working as the first effect in the signal chain.....Does anyone have an idea why this is happening or what my issue is?
Shouldn't that have been? :icon_mrgreen: