OK--Tom is swamped, and I don't want to steal his thunder by posting in the customs thread, but he has sent me something mind-bogglingly, universe-swallowlingly amazing, and I must testify.
I've been a lucky boy this year, enjoying masterful, wild and lateral-thinking-genius creations from C Rochambeau, Skeleton Prince/Eighty Tape, Montreal Assembly, Dwarfcraft, and many others, but this is a truly fitting capper to a fantastic year.
Please note, my current camera phone is an embarrassment to cameras and phones alike, on a Conchord Flight level, so hopefully this will not be the only record of how this looks--it does it no justice.
This is just because no pics, no exist:
I'm going to include a pic of Tom's final proof of concept, so you can better appreciate what he hath wrought without the eyepain from my horrid photography:
The differences are mostly attributable to my photofail, but it is apparent that Tom either adjusted the image somewhat or the quality of the image was altered by the process of finishing--and whotta finish it is--Tom went whole hog and encased the finish in beautifully clear thick acrylic resin faceplate that acts as eternal protective barrier and lens--the combination of the acrylic and what looks like some metallic paint effects gives the real deal an impossibly deep effect. In any case--the Blakean underpinnings of the pedal art's backstory are completely realized in person.
So, what is, you ask?
Well, on your left is Tom's Ant Hill Overdrive, a highly evolved and personalized overdrive with its feet in ye olde Muffe Fuzze circuit and its head in the clouds. On the right is the mighty, world-paving
Frequency Fucker!
Yes, I is a greedy gullets. Originally, I meekly inquired about the Ant Hill, because I wanted lofi fuzzy overdrive everywhere, but emboldened by Tom's humoring of my conceptual insanities/inanities/intensities-in-ten-cities, I conceived of a custom with an Ant Hill and a Magic Meter and fully flexible routing--an insane megalomaniac hive of space-warrior ants eating all the fuzzy magic in the universe, one planet a time. But when the true nuttiness of that plan was considered (along with some potential functional overlap), and the rumours of a dreaded Frequency Fucker surfaced, I changed courses, and Tom being the accommodating Fuzz God he is, agreed, and so this thing was born, slouching towards Bethlehem...Pennsylvania.
I know he has kicked his own ass building this pedal, and the results are fantastic. The FrFu alone is enough to warp orbits, and the Ant Hill is so far beyond my initial expectations I was at first delightedly flummoxed. But, beyond that, beyond expectations, beyond the limits of the physical laws that govern our universe, Tom made them truly stackable, in both directions. The level control on the FF provides a boost by itself that massively and organically extends the gain range in the Ant Hill, while the wilder parasitic and ring-mod-esque tones provided by the X2 and X3 functions are beautifully smoothed by the Ant Hill's gain structure or turbo-charged into full insanity by the starve (Crumb) function on board the Ant Hill. The Ant Hill's tone control (Bite) is the voice of reason--it does not provide vast cosmic synth filter sweeps, but rather always-musical sculpting of the highs. The Magnify knob seems to sweep between two clipping ranges (more clipping, more compressed, lower output on one end, and less clipping, more dynamic, higher output on the other, with a range of mixing of those extremes and little-to-no clipping in the center). Trans seems to adjust the amount of bass frequencies moving through the circuit, greatly impacting bass, clipping and volume levels as it is adjusted. Input gain control was designed into the circuit, but foregone on the build for sanity's sake--reducing input gain from the guitar results in a wide range of clipping colors evenly distributed along the guitar volume control--set to the highest available gain/clipping levels, I could always roll back to clean--though the roll back is unlike the classic fuzzface type--reduction of clipping is gradual rather than sudden, but it is attainable and without creating undesirable drops in output volume or excessive gating.
The overall effect of the Ant Hill is open, dynamic--in most settings the character of the guitar shines through almost as if the clean signal was always retained in the mix by parallel processing (which I don't think is actually the case). However, the crumb/starve knob has a huge range. At lower input gain levels, the range is actually fairly small before you hit complete signal death, but this is another exemplar of intelligent design, as when you flood the circuit with high input gain, the rest of the knob comes into play. All in all, the full range of over-gain and under-powering effects are attainable--gating, velcro, crumbling up to and including infinite sustain, paradoxic fade and swell effects and a wide range of trumpet, sax, synth and kazoo sounds.
And all this is attainable with the X2 and X3 switches off and the X3 clip and gain at minimum--from there the furthest reaches of dystopian subjugation are attainable with a flick and a twist. X2? Well it's like this Upper thing, man...you know, for kids. And X3? This is the frequency tripler from the Magic Meter remixed, revisioned and supercharged--just my all time favorite implementation of frequency multiplication, that's all.
All together?
Chaaaaaka Tooooom I love it man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Watch the Magivore's sides--he is a transglobal stepping razor.
And taller than all my other pedals--1590x rool!!!!Ok, that all.
"In a moment of unparalleled genius, Noel Parachute headed off this potential disaster by unplugging the microphone."