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Watch the video. I'm terrible at describing this. Also, I'd rather not upload to YouTube or anything, so rather than embed, here are some Dropbox direct links.
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On Sunday night, I read a page from Beavis Audio Research on creating a stutter pedal. It was simply a circuit that sent the signal from your instrument to ground with the press of a button. To really make a stuttering sound, you'd have to tap your foot quickly while playing your instrument. I wanted a pedal that stuttered the signal automatically when you toggled the effect.
In the end, I designed a circuit that, when a momentary button is held down, distorts the signal and cuts it on the low end of a square wave with the frequency set by a single knob. That's an awkward way of explaining it, but I don't want to get into how it works too much. If you don't want to watch the video or you blew out your sound parts on your laptop and can't hear it (like me!), it sounds like the blades of a helicopter or when you roll down one window of your car when you're on the highway. That's part of the reason it's called Helicopter - it was also partially inspired by the beginning guitar part of "Helicopter Song" by Monster Paws.
It could almost be called tremolo, but it is a square wave oscillation rather than a sine, has a greater range than what I've seen in tremolo, and distorts the signal out of necessity. I haven't heard many tremolo pedals, so I don't know if there are any similar to this. I'm fairly certain this works differently than a standard tremolo pedal.
[EDIT] I should probably just call this tremolo. Post a comment: Has this been done before? I'm fairly unfamiliar with pedals and what they sound like. [/EDIT]
I've given the first build of the pedal to my uncle, Nate, from Monster Paws for Christmas.
Super Low Quality
Medium Quality
Full Quality (Super Long Load Time)
On Sunday night, I read a page from Beavis Audio Research on creating a stutter pedal. It was simply a circuit that sent the signal from your instrument to ground with the press of a button. To really make a stuttering sound, you'd have to tap your foot quickly while playing your instrument. I wanted a pedal that stuttered the signal automatically when you toggled the effect.
In the end, I designed a circuit that, when a momentary button is held down, distorts the signal and cuts it on the low end of a square wave with the frequency set by a single knob. That's an awkward way of explaining it, but I don't want to get into how it works too much. If you don't want to watch the video or you blew out your sound parts on your laptop and can't hear it (like me!), it sounds like the blades of a helicopter or when you roll down one window of your car when you're on the highway. That's part of the reason it's called Helicopter - it was also partially inspired by the beginning guitar part of "Helicopter Song" by Monster Paws.
It could almost be called tremolo, but it is a square wave oscillation rather than a sine, has a greater range than what I've seen in tremolo, and distorts the signal out of necessity. I haven't heard many tremolo pedals, so I don't know if there are any similar to this. I'm fairly certain this works differently than a standard tremolo pedal.
[EDIT] I should probably just call this tremolo. Post a comment: Has this been done before? I'm fairly unfamiliar with pedals and what they sound like. [/EDIT]
I've given the first build of the pedal to my uncle, Nate, from Monster Paws for Christmas.
gotta say this is definitely unique, ive heard of kill switches but never heard of using it this way before
Nice clean design! Played it a few times. Scrfatching my head to see how to use this with my Yamaha Clavinova.
Merry Christmas-
Jocko
I built an effect similar to this recently, but in addition to the stutter effect which is controlled by a 555 astable oscillator, it also functions as a distortion pedal, as by varying the gain you can clip the signal that goes through the LM386 audio amp. My design is loosely based on that published on Instructables by spel3o - "Make Your Own Tremolo Effects Pedal"
The enclosure was originally diecast aluminum, but the DC power jack shorted when it was mounted. I went for the clear box, and only thought of adding LEDs the day after I put it all together. At that point, I was not in the mood to open it back up and make modifications. In the next build, I'm going for a bigger enclosure with more room for LEDs and helpful jacks, switches, and pots. There might be a fine rate adjustment pot, stereo input jack, and momentary stutter switch to kill the signal manually among other little things.
Since the 555 puts a load of pops and noise on the power supply lines, I also added a switch to remove it from the circuit entirely (as the primary function of my pedal was distortion). I noticed that in your video that your effect has the same behavior as mine - when the rate is all the way up, the clicks from turning on the signal are so high in frequency that they become an oscillator :-) .