ilovefuzz.com

you know, the sounds that are used in films etc. for the sound of a sonar device trying to detect other ships. there are a lot of different tries on YouTube; this one is closest to my memories of old films and TV.


https://youtu.be/SZzVl4cy6KE?si=Hq4YqgSwXhVjP_5M


there's some ADSR stuff called for, and also some kind of obvious modulation. i suppose you could dial this up on a decent synth in 15 or 20 minutes or download a sample, but i want to be able to do it in my loops which are still all guitars as a policy choice. am i right to think there's a bit of roll-off on the very start of the attack, and then a rather obvious lengthened sustain/release i'd probably de-emphasize a bit? it also sounds like two notes, the main tone and a subtle echo down a fifth. but i have no idea what guitar effects would help with this. i have a feeling that the Randy's Revenge could do it if i can find the right settings.

any ideas?

and yes, i know this isn't the real sound sonar makes. i'm not going for verité, i'm going for evocative.

If it was me, I'd take my favorite sonar clip and capture it as an IR. Stuff like Fog Convolver has all kinds of weird IRs (bowed bicycle tires, label printer, metal grinding, cordless screwdriver).

Going a longer route, a lot of stuff could be done with an EQ+harmonizer+reverb.

probably compression as well. if i had a computer with a DAW i could just dick around with plugins switching shit on and off.

i need something Pladask for this.

Fully wet reverb may be all you need- play an artificial harmonic somewhere that sounds right pitch-wise and I feel like you’d be there.

If you have any filters/eqs with resonance you can also try pinging the filter but results vary widely. If you have a mixer with eq you can try running the guitar into it and create a feedback loop and ping that. Again, results vary.

From guitar, I’d try to find the behind-the-nut of behind-the-bridge length of string that gets me in the ballpark. (If you need to pitch shift to get the right final pitch it could even help get a better simulation.) Then I’d try to take some of the attack off. (Still rocking the EHX Attack Decay? Seems like it could help.) I suppose the right compressor could but that is probably more in special applications land rather than bog standard Dynacomp.

Some eq or tone knob tweaking could help shape the tone. I’d probably throw on some reverb with a bunch of diffusion in the mix—looking for early blur, not necessarily a long decay.

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at some point in the near future i'm going to have to get out the FEB and main board so i have tools available. to start with i think i'll use the Ibanez Lo Fi or Generation Loss to degrade fidelity, the So High So Low dual filter to reduce bandwidth, Randy's Revenge to get a bi-tone, and probably chorus for the warble. some artificial-sounding reverb but not too much, more dwell than depth, maybe the Black Finger tube compressor and/or the Attack Decay. there's a definite pitch shift in the modulation, and on close listening it's more like a note/fifth/octave signal than a bi-tone...you can hear the low octave come in about 3/4 of a second after the initial attack. probably use one of the guitars with behind-the-bridge string length available; i'll try different options including the Jazzmaster, 335, DeArmonds, Aristocrat, White Falcon, Pro Jet, Kondor, Hopf, and T-Bird.

this sort of thing can be hard to deal with, but it's much easier than working on guitars because you can't actually fuck anything up in the process. and i sort of enjoy the process...i like the intellectual challenge, but it bungs up against my laziness.

I like to use my KORG ToneWorks 301dl for exactly that purpose, as shown here in my demo video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=umS7Tst8Iz4&t=266s

OK, so that's a delay with multiple fx, yes? what settings out of all the stuff buried in there are you using?

sounds like that new OBNE/Emily pedal would get about 67% of the way there.

dubkitty wrote: ↑Thu Jan 22, 2026 11:43 am OK, so that's a delay with multiple fx, yes? what settings out of all the stuff buried in there are you using?

Actually this is a quite limited delay, but with a few nice functions. There is a pre-delay (in this "sonar ping" setting, see picture below, I use the maximum pre-delay time) and the main delay is very short. Sadly, this mid-'90s completely digitally controlled pedal doesn't offer too many values, so the delay steps when turning the knob are a bit rough. But the separate High and Low Damp plus the "Hi-Fi/Lo-Fi" filter are simply awesome.


The 301dl is very easy to control. There are eight options to tweak, each knob has two functions, the switch defines which one you can adjust. If you find a setting that you like, store it with the right footswitch (hold for a few seconds). There are two memory spaces.

I really like that series a lot. The 105od Classic OD is the only digital overdrive that I love - much more convincing than all the BOSS COSM stuff together.

the So High So Low can possibly do that. between the filters and the preamp/distortion it can do a lot.