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.

EARTH ++

So, the development was Earth was kind of strange.

I had just finalized the circuit when people started actually buying Fire Fuzz, and I my first rush of sales was a bit overwhelming. It was hard to spread my attention between that and a new effect.

I hadn’t really planned on doing much marketing or anything until I finished the entire Elements series, and the sudden rush of sales called for a bit of a change of plans.

In the midst of this, the prototype PCB’s sounded good, but were a bit awkward to build, so I re-did the PCB for the first run.

They didn’t sound the same, though! The prototype had more gain, but the ones that came were more of what I was aiming to do, which was make a fairly low-gain overdrive using a mellowed-out fuzz circuit.

Because they sounded cool and fit with what I wanted, I figured there had actually been some mistake in my prototype layout, and went ahead and released Earth v1.

After a few of these, I began to notice that the enclosures I was getting just didn’t polish well. So I decided I’d change to higher quality enclosures, a smaller form-factor, and an even easier to build PCB.

These new PCBs sounded like the prototypes! This was still a pretty crazy time for me, and I had been talking with Guitar Center about selling them a few pedals. I didn’t want to push that back any further, as I wanted them to be able to include Earth in their holiday marketing.

So I didn’t really dig into what happened with those v1 Earths.

Flash forward a few years, and I had the time to take a look. What happened was still extremely confusing.

It seems like the footprint for the transistor I used was backwards. Everything looked right, but when I really examined it, it seemed like the parts that were supposed to be connected to the emitter were connected to the collector, and visa versa.

It seemed like a happy accident that it worked at all. But then I tried to put it on the breadboard to see if I could do some mods to the handful of them I had left.

I couldn’t get it to work on the breadboard, though. Flipping the transistor around just made it not function. Having it in “right” made the v2. I dug around for the PCB layout on my computer, and confirmed I had overwritten it. Some other spooky jazz was afoot, and I conceded that there must be more to it than dreamt of in my philosophy.

I had a few of those PCBs left, and wanted to do something different with them. I also still was interested in modding the v1s I had left, and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to cascade a few of them in one effect. Earth ++ is the result.

I only had the parts to make five of these, one of which is my personal one. Because it seems some sort of black magic happened with those PCBs, and because I no longer have the files related to those, there appears to be no way to make any more of them.

So, I built them in the enclosures of the models I was modifying, threw on some paint to differentiate how they look, but was then left with a crucial point: adding a gain pot for each board seemed silly, and when I played it, it seemed like there was really only one sweet-spot with the gain.

So I decided to replace the gain control with a tone control, and that was that. I was really into simple tone controls at the time, and by just rolling off highs, it seemed to add a lot more versatility to the pedal.

MIC

I didn’t really intend to make this a product.

I was getting a few parts, and needed to spend more to meet the minimum shipping requirements. I saw some parts for a condenser mic and thought it would be cool to build something like this.

I made one for me and was having a lot of fun with it, so I mentioned it on my Instagram and a lot of people were interested, so I decided to refine the design a bit and make it available.

Frankly, it’s a weird thing. It is very sensitive, and has a fairly flat EQ. It takes a 9V power supply, and the output jack is for a regular instrument cable.

I’ve not really used many microphones, and didn’t really want to spend the time or money buying something when I had no intention of using it traditionally - I wanted to be able to use effects, and every time I look at DI boxes and the like, I end up feeling kinda dumb. This mic works more or less like you’d expect a guitar to - you just plug it in and play around, so there’s really no learning curve to it.

At the time of this writing, I don’t have any in stock, but I think The Melody Maker in Clinton, MA may have some (you might need to go to their physical shop though, I’m not totally sure).

When I was designing and building this, I was really obsessed with trying to make new things with PCBs from other projects. This is built with an Earth v2 PCB, but basically every value is changed, some parts are added, and some other removed.

I’m not really sure about building anymore of these. Let me know if you want one and I will see what I can do!