Time Flies

Hard to believe it has been over a year since I last wrote here.

To put things briefly, everything is still in a state of flux. My wife and I have somehow become unwitting Dharma Bums. We haven’t been hard-sleeping or missing meals, but we honestly have no “resided” somewhere since the start of 2024. Still haven’t exactly stuck the landing from Australia.

Not that everything has been bad; it has been quite the journey that we have been on. That’s not really a story for here, though. I’ll probably write a book about it someday.

The story for here is that I still have not had a workshop or anything like that. I had to let go of my guitar to make all the traveling a bit easier. Musically, I’ve been forced to work from a computer.

Around this time last year, I started making a video game. That game is out on Steam now. It’s a non-violent platformer about using music to heal. You eventually discover fuzz, and are able to save your little world with it. It’s a Bolt Fuzz.

Making that game forced me to take the plunge into VCV Rack. VCV Rack has honestly changed my life. I’ve been able to explore all the musical ideas I have wanted to bring to life. So far this year, I’ve actually released 50 albums under the name mountain cloud (reaching 100 total releases!). That is largely thanks to VCV Rack.

And that leads me to the actual point of this post: I’ve been unable to work in hardware, but using VCV Rack has taught me a lot of synthesis and given me some pretty interesting ideas. The first of which is that I’m porting Water to VCV Rack!

This is my first time really working with C++. I have no real estimate of when the module will be finished, but the idea is to take the features of Water and open up the controls to accept CV. I’m planning on releasing this for free. Someday, hopefully soon, I’d like to make this as a hardware module as well.

So that’s what I’m up to. This journey has always felt like “next week things will settle down,” and they really might. There is always a chance that in the next few weeks, I’ll be actually living somewhere and able to start building up my workshop again. But until then, I guess I’ll be on the computer.

2024 Update

Hello!

2024 has been a strange year for me. The migration policy of Australia changed in such a way that ruined my long-term plans to stay there, so I moved back to the US. The US student loans program changed in such a way that I couldn’t have continued law school in Australia or any kind of further education anywhere, so I’m back to looking to various arts as being how I make a living (and that’s fine with me, really). My wife suffered an injury. We’ve been kind of stuck at her parents’ place while she recovers.

While there are silver linings to everything (I can’t begin to articulate how strange the last twelve months have been), there haven’t really been any with respect to pedals. I haven’t had a space to build things since I left Australia, and am unlikely to for the rest of the year. I’ve been designing what I can on the computer, but there’s not a place for me to setup shop to build anything or test any ideas. Things can always change, but I am not expecting to be able to actual build another pedal until December.

But there is at least some good news — after half a year without a guitar (the longest stretch I’ve gone without a guitar since I started playing, more than half of my lifetime ago), I’ve managed to carve out a space to be able to play guitar again. And I’m very excited about that.

Anyway, I just wanted to spell out what has been happening this year, at least to some extent.

Thanks everyone for all your support over the years, and I appreciate your patience. Someday, I’ll be firing up the soldering iron again and at this rate will have like 8 new pedals to release when that time comes.

TAKE A HIKE

Verdant hills and fog-enshrouded mountains: a soft-clipping overdrive.

This is one of the most common kinds of effects, yet unique in its own way.

It is not transparent - it adds some majesty to your tone no matter what. This is because it boosts the middle and some higher frequencies while softening the lows.

Unlike most of my other effects, this is not built with anything other than a guitar in mind.

In addition to the above video, I made a short album showcasing how it sounds.

Features

Altitude: volume; how high will you climb?

Peak: tone control; let all the brightness shine through the clouds, or roll them off to sound like hills in the distant fog.

Terrain: gain; take a gentle stroll through the park or get a bit more wild and go off the path.

hills: asymmetric silicon diodes (1N4148 and a Zener); higher headroom and more volume than mountains, yet with enough gain to break a sweat.

mountains: matching Schottky diodes (think germanium but not unobtainium); will need to raise the altitude a bit, more rugged than hills.

secret mode! Finesse the diode selector switch into the middle and it becomes a boost. The terrain control will not add gain, but volume - this can get pretty loud!

SAHARA

Not including my personal one, there are only two of these.

I have been overly concerned with how things respond to bass in most of my pedals. With this, I wanted to do the opposite and for the first time, chose to do something which actually rolled off some bass.

The result was that there was less boominess! Lower frequencies still come through, but their overtones get accentuated more than the fundamental tone, and that’s actually pretty cool. Bass guitar still works well with it, too.

At that point, it still sounded a little lopsided - rolling off some bass made it feel like there was too much in the higher frequencies. So I rolled those off as well, and the result was a fuzz with a bit of a mid-hump.

To really depart from other designs, I took the clipping diodes out. This not only allows the effect to get louder, but it also means it isn’t always clipping. You’ve got to turn the gain up some to get the transistor cooking - and that cooked transistor is all you’re really hearing.

To my ears, there’s just something sandy about it.

I built this with the intention of it being a standard part of my lineup, but I was also in the middle of moving to Australia.

Now that I’m here and have tools and everything again, I’m not so sure I want to continue any of my old designs and may take this as an opportunity to come up with an all-new lineup.

But it is hard to just build two of an effect and call it done. So if you are interested in one, contact me and I’ll see if we can work something out.

GRUMP & BURNT

Grump and burnt are different, but very similar effects.

They were both made around the same time - as you may know, part of the idea behind the Elements series was to make circuits that I could easily modify into new effects.

These were my first two swings at making something with Fire PCBs. It didn’t really go as planned with either one.

I wanted them to have more, but smoother saturation, and have wider ranging tone controls.

The tone controls worked as I expected, but nothing else did.

I didn’t build these on a breadboard, I just did some calculations on paper and built them. After two attempts at not getting what I was going for, I went back to designing on the breadboard.

These things weren’t what I wanted, but were still pretty cool and I’d play with them now and then.

When it came time to move to Australia, I decided to sell them. While I have no control over this actually happening, I always thought it would be cool for two friends/lovers/people with some weird connection to have them, because it is kind of like the pedal version of having half a medallion.

And that’s the story behind Grump and burnt.