Weird pulsing ring mod effect 6th May 2009

Been a little while since I wrote about effects, mainly due to me being busy building-up a stockpile of Harmonic Percolators and Muffs, and ironing out a glitch in the Grumbly Wolf MkII. As such, Liam's (the first) GWMkII had to come back for a little fixin'. I also replaced the output pot with a 100k one (a mod learned from the low output problem with vintage MXR Dist pluses- seriously, never build these with 10k or 50k pots on the output cos they won't be loud enough!) and added a booster before the ring mod section. I designed about the smallest layout for the classic Electro Harmonix LPB-1 I can imagine, with tweaked values from the Mike Livesey circuit (this one).


Last night I finished this pulsing ring mod. What pulses is the frequency of the ring mod effect, and it sounds crazy, like 50s sci-fi. Stacey says I should call it the Telstar, which is a good name. The controls will be input gain (this controls the overall level too) and speed (the speed of the pulses). You can see from the labeled photo below that it combines the aforementioned LPB/Saltboost, the LMC567CN pseudo ring-mod (courtesy of Tim Escobedo and Worth Ekik) and a pulsing LED/LDR network. It really is a thing to behold, and I'll have a demo up as soon as I whack it in a box. The only downside with this is the relative high price and limited availability of the LMC567CN chippy chip.