Tag: octave

Categories
Effects

Introducing the Screech!

Yay! The first 100 Screech pedals just got into stock at Vintage King. Again, the very first production model went to Blake Mills. He immediately started doing thing I didn’t even know it could do. Damn.

Here’s the info from the product page at gorepedals.com. Pardon then obnoxious use of the third-person.

OVERTONE OVERDOSE
The Joe Gore Screech is descended from vintage octave fuzzes like the Ampeg Scrambler and Dan Armstrong Green Ringer, but it’s not a clone. It provides much clearer octave overtones, and you don’t need an extra booster for great results.

Most octave fuzzes work best when you play near the 12th fret using the neck pickup. But Screech provides potent octaves regardless of neck position or pickup setting. It also does fine non-octave fuzz. A common mod for octave fuzzes is to add a switch that switches of the diodes, removing the octave effect. The problem is, the resulting sound is dull as dirt. Here, though, though non-octave fuzz is sufficiently fiery and dynamic to stand on its own.

Unlike most things Joe Gore makes, Screech is not especially dynamic. It needs consistently heavy gain for its powerful octave effects. But as on many vintage octave fuzzes, you get freaky harmonics and other interesting noises when you lower your guitar’s volume control.

Screech runs on standard 9-volt batteries or power supplies. It was created in San Francisco by Joe Gore and is built in Michigan by skilled craftspeople paid a fair wage. It comes with a lifetime warranty.

TO USE: The single knob is a master volume. (There’s no gain control because this circuit demands high gain to generate such strong octaves.) When you hit the DIST footswitch without the octave (OCT) engaged, the LED glows red. With the octave on, the light is yellow. (You can’t use the octave section without DIST activated.)

When Screech is bypassed, you can specify whether the octave will be engaged when you activate the pedal. If the LED glows green, the octave will be engaged when you hit DIST. If the LED isn’t glowing, you’ll get non-octave fuzz when you step on DIST.

BACKGROUND INFO FOR PEDAL GEEKS: Here’s an article and video I put together a few years ago, demonstrating all the classic octave fuzz circuits. Toward the end I show an early prototype of the circuit that would become Screech. It’s evolved since then, so don’t consider this a proper demo. It’s just some amusing pedal geekery. 🙂

Categories
Effects

Gore Pedals: New for 2017

Oh man — my friends at Premier Guitar just posted a video of me demoing four of my new pedal prototypes at NAMM. I didn’t even think I’d have these ready by showtime, but I powered out at the last minute. (Maybe ’cause I needed something to take my mind of the inauguration.)

It’s been a busy month since we filmed this. We’ve settled on names, graphics, and specs, and everything is in development. (Though they’re still a few months away from shipping.) I’ve included the first-draft enclosure graphics as well.

Purr is a minimal one-knob optical vibrato. Yep — one knob, which means no independent rate and depth controls. Sound crazy? I agree. But it just sort of works! (I explain my questionable reasoning in the video.)

It’s not a deep, wobbly pitch-shift effect — more like cross between a really warm, pretty tremolo and a subtle optical vibrato. It’ll have the same large knob as my Duh pedal, so you can make adjustments with your foot, assuming you’re not as clumsy as I am.

It’s my fave modulation circuit, one I’ve used on a number of my YouTube videos. Here it’s on throughout at a very subtle setting.

In this video it’s set more strongly, though I toggle it on and off as I loop additional layers.

Screech, a mutant spinoff of the Octavia and Green Ringer octave fuzzes, is an outgrowth of the experiments I did did a few years ago, when I built models of every major octave fuzz design, and then attempted a variation of my own. (It’s not too far removed from the final pedal in this video, which appears at the 10-minute mark.)

It’s got the most extreme octave effect I’ve ever heard from an analog octave fuzz, and unlike on an Octavia or Green Ringer, the effect works in all neck positions and at all pickup settings. You can also bypass the octave portion of the circuit for a straight distortion sound. (That’s not a new idea—it’s a popular Octavia mod. But that non-octave Octavia sound is dull as dirt, whereas this, I think, has a bit more character and impact.)

Porkolator also springs from a video demo/experiment of a few years back. It’s my oddball spin on the Interfax Harmonic Percolator, which is already pretty odd to begin with. It uses the same weird combination of negative- and positive-ground transistors for that sort of gravelly, decidedly non-tube-like distortion that Steve Albini loves so much. But all the part values differ, and the gain stages work very differently. There’s also an independent boost stage that can generate tons of extra level if desired. Again, it’s not that far removed from the final example in my octave fuzz video. (It appears starting at 5:55.)

Unlike the other three pedals, Cult Germanium Channel is pretty much finished. (We were originally going to include it among the 2016 releases, but decided that three new products were enough.) Its heart is the same primitive germanium overdrive circuit as in my Cult pedal, but with lots of added doodads: a tone-shaping pre-gain control, great-sounding active 2-band tone control, and an output trim. You can read more about Cult Germanium Channel here.

The NAMM video also features a demo of Kitty Boy, my imaginary vision of a germanium fuzz that should have existed in the 1960s. It’s sort of a cross between a Maestro Fuzz Tone and a Tone Bender Mk. I, which can go from lightly overdriven “Satisfaction” tones to hyper-saturated Ziggy Stardust glory. (It’s inspired by a conversation with Lyle Workman, so thanks, Lyle!)

I hope folks dig these. I’ll keep you posted about release dates and final prices.

Thanks, Jason Shadrick and Perry Bean, for doing such a nice job with the video and squeezing me into a brutal production schedule at the last minute.

Jet and Kaiju say: “When Joe plugs in those horrible fuzz pedals, we hide in the closet. But that new Purr pedal with the black cat on it isn’t so bad.”
Categories
Acoustic guitar Music

Magic Fairy Dust: The Veillette Avante Gryphon

I recently reviewed the gorgeous little Veillette Avante Gryphon for Premier Guitar and liked it so much that I bought one. This was my first opportunity to record it in my studio.

The Avante Gryphon is a relatively low-cost version of Woodstock luthier Joe Veillette’s Gryphon, an 18.5″-scale 12-string designed to be tuned a minor seventh (an octave minus two frets) above standard. But while 12-string guitars feature octave-tuned string pairs, here all six courses are unisons, as on a mandolin. In fact, the Avante Gryphon sounds a lot like a mandolin, but with a wider range and guitar-like tuning. And unlike the couple of janky plywood mandolins I own, it plays gloriously in tune. It’s made (very nicely!) by Korean CNC robots and sells for $1,400, as opposed to $4K+ for Veillette’s hand-built models.

For years I’ve been looking for the right upscale mandolin, but now I’m happy I found this instead. My original motivation was a high-tuned soprano instrument for multi-guitar arrangements, or for magic-fairy-dust studio overdubs. But the thing is so fun — and sounds so darn pretty — that I can’t stop playing it solo. This Bach prelude, for example:

I won’t recap my review here—check it out if you’re curious. Instead, let’s yak about Johann Sebastian!

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Categories
DIY Effects guitar

Octave Fuzz Overdose!
Seven Classic Circuits

These funky homemade pedals represent all the leading octave-fuzz circuits.
These funky homemade pedals represent all the leading octave-fuzz circuits.

I had no idea I had so many octave fuzz pedals! I had no idea they sounded so different! And after spending way too much time auditioning and recording them, I have no idea when I’m ever going to be able to stand listening to them again! :noshake:

Naw, just kidding — I had lots of fun putting together this octa-fuzz fest. It features no name-brand pedals, just DIY clones based on old circuits. But hey, most of today’s octave fuzzes are also clones of old circuits.

In fact, imitation has always been the name of the game here. The Roger Mayer Octavia used by Jimi Hendrix was inspired by a circuit found in a British mixing console. The US-made Tycobrahe Octavia was a ripoff of Mayer’s circuit, though tone snobs tend to regard it as the superior unit. It’s certainly one of the rarest and most valuable stompboxes ever.  The name “Octavia” has also been slapped on many other variations of the circuit, including some particularly dismal models. The Prescription Electronics Experience and Lovetone Ultimate Octave are based on the Foxx Tone Machine. The Dan Armstrong Green Ringer was based on the Ampeg Scrambler, and I used the Green Ringer circuit as a jumping-off point for some of my own designs. The sincerest form of flattery abounds here.

If you make it through this seven-circuit survey, you’ll encounter most of the major players, and if you hear something that particularly interests you, you can build it yourself using readily available schematics, or buy a nice kit or boutique clone.

Now, don’t confuse this effect with modern digital devices that actually transpose the notes you play. Octave fuzzes use an electronic trick to cancels out much of the fundamental of each note, making the octave overtone stand out more prominently. The process is called full-wave rectification, and ever-knowledgable reader mwseniff explains it far more capably than I in a comment following my previous post on this topic. It’s an odd, glitchy effect that tends to require specific playing techniques for the best results. And for better or worse, it’s an effect that has so far been difficult to mimic digitally. Sure, some of the modeling boxes out there have interesting-sounding octave-fuzz effects, but they tend to score low on the analog-realism scale.

Check out the video. The post-mortem comes after, as post-mortems usually do. 

Continue reading “Octave Fuzz Overdose!
Seven Classic Circuits”
Categories
Acoustic guitar Recording

How Nashville High-Stringing Works

You don't have to be high in Nashville to enjoy Nashville high-strung.
You don’t have to be high in Nashville to enjoy Nashville high-strung.

Nashville high-strung tuning is one of the guitar’s great magic tricks. It has a delicious, “secrets of the Guild” quality — you feel like an insider just knowing what it is.

Not that I did know what it is until embarrassingly late in life. For the sake of my fellow late-bloomers, I’ll explain: You replace your guitar’s lowest four strings with thinner strings tuned an octave higher than normal.

You can think of it as using the higher-pitched of a each pair in a 12-string string set. (Or the top two strings of a normal set, and the top four strings from another normal set, with the first string as the third string, the second string as the fourth, etc.)

I love how this tuning can work subliminal magic, or step front and center for marquee riffs. Nashville session players conceived it as a way to add stereo shimmer to doubled acoustic guitar tracks. But rock players have used it to great effect as a foreground sound, as heard on the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Floyd’s “Hey You,” Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind,” and Tracy Chapman’s “The Promise.”

Here’s a quick little demonstration, both solo and in a mix:

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