Phase before or after distortion

Phase before or after distortion?

I won't bore you with my opinion on the matter.  We guitarists are all individuals and like what we like.  Sometimes you don't know what you like until you hear it and then it's all or nothing

The phase pedal or phase sifter has been use by many a guitar player.  Eddie Van Halen notoriously used one to enhance his solos. The sweeping shift of frequencies in and out of phase with each other seems other worldly.

  But where do you put it in the signal chain?  Only you know for sure.

Check out my demo of phase pedals before and after distortion.

Phase versus vibe pedal

Out of context one could argue that some Phase pedals and Vibe pedals sound the same.  Granted they both provide tons of swirly tones and some do a faux Leslie better than others. Still,the vibe and the phase pedal have similar qualities.

Eddie Van Halen certainly solidified the potential for phase pedals.  The likes of Jimi Hnedrix and Robin Trower certainly used the Uni-Vibe very effectively. So what's the difference.

Phaser, or Phase shifter pedals tend to use transistors and resistors to blend a dry signal with an out of phase wet signal. Vibe or the original Uni-Vibe used a photo resister and lamp to achieve a similar but usually more dramatic effect. In fact, the Uni-Vibe was first designed to emulate a Leslie rotating speaker. While it did not achieve the exact desired effect, it did achieve a sound all it's own

I decided to take my phase and vibe pedals and compare them side by side to demonstrate the similarities and the differences.

Check out the Phase and Vibe pedal comparison and see for yourself what each pedal does.

Cheap Analog Delay

Guitarists in general are mostly gear hounds. We love new gear whether it's a new guitar, amp, or stomp-box. Some of us are complete gear snobs and will not even consider anything that isn't top of the line or boutique. Some of us simply look at what the best tool for the job is.  I'm not judging here, i'm just stating facts.

I recently stumbled upon a budget friendly analog delay on Ebay that I simply couldn't pass up.  Now I own several delays from a Roland SDE1000 rack unit to a Zoom multi effect, and my favorite, the TC electronics flashback.  While I didn't need this delay I felt compelled to buy it based on the price and the very diminutive size.

This analog delay from Mosky Audio was less than $30 on ebay, but how does it sound. You decide.

Scott's Superdrive

As you may know I've dabbled in the DIY pedal scene for a while.  I love the smell of melting solder and the fly by the seat of your pants "will it work?" feeling when making a pedal.

A number of years ago I started trying my hand at creating something different by mashing different pedal designs together. Some of these were non starters and others were OK.  This particular experiment came out quite well.

Scott's Superdrive took the Tube Screamer type circuit and married it to a Big Muff type tone stack. Of course each of these parts of the pedal received their own tweaking and modifications.  At the end of it all was a Mosfet output stage to recover some of the signal loss from the tone stack.

The result was an overdrive with more drive than a Tube Screamer, less buzz than a Big Muff, and an overall interesting characteristic all it's own.

The Shtizu Fuzz

The fuzz pedal has been around for a long time. It has come and gone and come again in popularity. Sometimes you just get it until you get it.  But once you get it, it's magical.

I have been building my own pedals for 10 years.  I took all the readily available information from the interwebz and built the Shitzu fuzz.  It's small, hairy, and loud.

Essentially it's a Fuzz Face circuit with a few tweaks.  The first transistor is a lower gain transistor and the second is higher gain. Also, it has a potentiometer on the power supply so you can reduce the voltage starving it and creating those great sputtery fuzz sounds. It also has a poteniometer on the input

to reduce the signal to the first transistor to tailor the amount of signal hitting the first gain stage.  Lastly, I just omitted the fuzz control since I like it dimed anyways.  The volume control on your guitar or the control to limit the signal on the first gain stage more than give you enough control over the amount of fuzz

It's a simple build and a great sounding and versatile pedal.  Check out this demo below.

Fuzz, I just never got it, until I got it.

The below post is a re-post from one of my old blogs, enjoy.

Fuzz pedals have been around for more than 40 years now. They were the first attempt to get the sound of a cranked amplifier without having to crank the amplifier. They were/are crude, and dare I say, sometimes not very pleasant sounding. Now if you were a guitar player in the late 60's, this was all you had at your disposal. Technology has advanced, amplifiers are capable of ridiculous gain at moderate volumes, and there are a million other distortion devices. So why does the fuzz pedal still prevail.

I came up in the era of the shred guitarist. Van Halen, Randy Rhoades, Ygwie Malmsteen. The requirements for this type of playing was a high gain yet articulate and clear sound to allow all the fast picked notes to be heard. There was no room for the woolly, unpredictable sound of a fuzz pedal so I just never gave them much thought. They were yesterdays technology.

Fast forward 20 years. Shred is less prevalent. Grunge hit us all in the face. And the wall of sound was being driven by fuzz pedals. All of a sudden, the Big Muff, Fuzz Face, Tone Bender etc... were all over the place. I couldn't believe it. Why were these guys using old technology? Of course grunge has since passed but the fuzz pedal is still here. Holy crap.

I finally decided to look into this a little. As I was learning to build my own stompboxes I decided that I needed to dive head first into a fuzz pedal. I build a fuzz face variant. After i got it working, I plugged in and let it rip. What an experience (no pun intended). I realized that while crude and somewhat odd sounding at times, the overtones and singing qualities of the pedal made me take notice.

 There is a great range of sounds in a good fuzz pedal. Rolling back the volume yields a sweet overdrive with a hint of grit. Running it full out gets you a tone reminiscent of hell on a bad day. I finally got it.

If you have wondered about what all the fuss about fuzz is, go to your local music store and check one out. You may be surprised.

Scott