Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Moving in and out of sound with Filters.

For all of you My Bloody Valentine fans out there,


This is Kevin Shields' supposed rig from the Loveless tour.  At the beginning of his chain he has his primary distortion unit followed by 2 graphic equalizer pedals.  This is in addition to the 3-band EQ that is already in the Marshall Shredmaster.  So it seems that he has 3-preset tones that he can utilize just at the beginning of his pedal chain.  One of my goals is to make something similar to this.  It has been essentially seen in the Death By Audio Kill Kill Filter.  However There are some things about filters that I've learned in the meantime which I think could be added.



The generic Big Muff Pi Tone is what I plan on using in most of my designs, from what I understand it is both a hi-pass and low-pass filter which can be sweeped between the two. One of it's characteristics is the Mid-Range Notch, which depending on the music style you're playing may cause you to get lost in the band's mix.  With out a proper equalizer you might not be able to hear yourself too well.  One thing I've seen from the BYOC big muff clone is that they have changed some of the capacitor values in order to achieve the mid range notch, a flat mids tone, as well as mid-range boost.  This option has already been applied to the distortion unit, but I'd like to take it further and apply it to the dual filter idea.

What I'd like to do is to be able to choose the general mid-range characteristic, and then be able to switch between two sweepable frequency equalizers to further characterize the tone.  I'd like to have a little bit more options in terms of mid-range characterizations, so instead of a single rotary switch to choose between 3 mid-range options, I'd like to implement 2 toggle switches to choose from 4 different tonal characteristics.

I'll have to see how I'd go about doing this, I think a set of DPDT switches in place of the capacitors in the filter would allow for me to make the toggle switches work properly. Some LED's would be nice as well, probably 3mm as indicators of which characteristic option is currently selected so they don't compete with the.  I've got a basic layout created for this pedal, I'll just need to upload it...another saga another day....Duplex Filter something or other...

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