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Look what arrived tonight! Gated squelchy computer fuzz all dayyyy

BEUTFULL! Was that made by Tom or Eric?

AWESOME! Lovely colour scheme.

blakestree wrote:BEUTFULL! Was that made by Tom or Eric?

possibly Jero, he was building for eric for a bit.

mine landed..

Looking great! The both of them. Dibs on flip.

dude this one ain't gettin' flipped. I spent a whole session with just this pedal last night. OMG.... the fuzz!

tuj wrote:dude this one ain't gettin' flipped.

Famous last words.

UglyCasanova wrote:

tuj wrote:dude this one ain't gettin' flipped.

Famous last words.

Well it's not like it was jwar or neon that said it

Tristan wrote:The Shoe Pedals Silver Apple is said to be based on the Wolf Computer as well.

Yes it is. I got started in pedals after modding a lot of guitar wiring and the Wolf Computer was one of my favorite pedals, so the first pedal I ever made was a straight Wolf Computer for a friend (using a schematic Eric had given me). I ended up just giving him my Wolf Computer, though, and then proceeded to keep modding and rebuilding the clone every day for a few weeks to learn how changing different things would affect the circuit's behavior.

Around that time Mellowtone also went under and i was living right near a guitar shop in Brooklyn. People liked the little projects I was bringing in and thus SHOE was born with the Silver Apple Oscillating Fuzz as the first model, followed by Pixelfix (now named Pixel). Pixel came out of me intentionally breaking a Silver Apple by adding an extra transistor where it should not have been and then doing a lot of experimentation to get the pedal A. working again. and B. sounding awesome. The result ended up being a pretty much totally different circuit, but it has some lineage there, at least historically.

So, yeah, what I ended up coming up with for the Silver Apple was essentially the same circuit on the board with a few tweaks, but a totally different set of controls, and a magnetic relay system for doing two separate oscillation settings that are toggled back and forth by a momentary switch.

All of my own most used Wolf Computer settings are in there, plus a range of sounds that I couldn't get with the WC control scheme.

I have, over the years, build a straight Wolf Computer or two as well.

can someone explain how the WC circuit works? I mean, it is so simple, I would never think that I would get decaying sub octave and partials with just a fuzz, especially one so deceptively simple.

It's got that mellowtone jesus in it.

It's similar to a fuzz factory but using silicon transistors (I have used a variety and some mixed with germanium or mosfets in various Silver Apple iterations, but the wolf computer was always 2n3904s and I usually end up using those, too).

So, basically the circuit is set up in such a way that if you bias the transistors in certain ranges they will turn into an oscillator. If you have fine enough control over those ranges you can set it on the edge of doing this (just barely gated) and your guitar signal can then be used to push it over the edge (turn it on). At that point, the signal you are feeding it begins to interact with the pedal's own oscillation frequency and you get a bunch of weird shit happening because of that interference. It will hang onto notes related to its own resonant frequency and fight against others, etc. So if you're getting suboctaves it is probably oscillating around an octave lower on its own than the guitar signal.

gotcha, that makes sense and was what I suspected was going on, but I'm just surprised it is achieved with so few components. The brilliance of the WC is the squelch control to tame the oscillation. I get these fuzzy chords that decay into a 5th-down, octave-down, 2-fifth's-down, etc pattern in a very video-gamey appegiated kind of way that is pure brilliance and belies the simplicity of the circuit.