| RDS01 Samsquanch |
|
The Samsquanch is a pedal I had under design in 2018 intended to be finished by 2019. It's a CD4096, hex inverter based tube-sim/distortion/fuzz/synth that's scalabe via a myriad of switches and an otherwise very simple circuit. The whole thing was sort-of improvised at first.
Circuit Design The Samsquanch started off one night when I was playing with various logic-gate CMOS chips in my workshop. At some point I decided to see if I could devleop a guitar synthesizer just using a lone CD-4096 and bashing the inputs with various high output guitars, and latching all the oscillators together - well...it kinda worked. What I did was wired up the circuit using Parasitstudios.de's CMOS pedal guide, and started adding oscillators gradually to the circuit. When I added one oscillator what I got was practically a Joe Walsh sounding overdrive, think James Gang era. It was literally like Joe Walsh "in a box" practically. I could play Rocky Mountain Way and it was VERY close to the sound on the radio. Nuts huh? When I came back I forgot to plug in the power, now my guitar sounded glassy going through the unpowered circuit, sort of like Robert Cray, Jamie Scott West-Oram (The Fixx), or Stevie Ray Vaughn's clean tone, if I took it out, the amp tone changed. Huh....so now I have 2 sounds. Next I tossed on the second oscillator + power, and the gutiar tone was familiar.....uh, now this thing sounds like Paul Dean on the early Loverboy records - NUTS. Paul Dean in a frickin' box, no EQ, no filtering, just the pure CD4096 circuit with what components I had on hand. Here I am, one IC, and I'm getting all these "god tier" tones out of it. I put the Hondo on it and I sounded like the Dortmund VHS! Excited, I kept going.... More Distortion put me into Nu-Metal territory. More filters got me closer to super-fuzzy fuzz, and before too long, I was playing with not fuzz, but a pure square wave with some Fuzzy artifacts! Cool...so I have all these famous tones in one little box, no modeling, no Eq, nothing but this chip, a 1M resistor, and me adding more resistors and capacitors to drive the signal further...that's it. So then I got a final circuit/schematic drawn up and then had to come up with a name for it. Samsquantch came to mind because it's Bubbles (from Trailer Park Boys) mispronounciatiion of "Sasquatch" or "bigfoot" or "yeti" - get my drift. This thing was capable of a lot of hair in it's sound. It made sense, one of it's distortion tones was Canadian, and one could arque Doug Johnson or Geddy Lee melody lines could be emulated via the synth - I did play parts of "Subdivisions" on this thing. What makes it more hilarious is this could probably be jammed in a really tiny enclosure! |
