Anyone know how synth pedals work?

[The Rocket From The Tombs]

Roughly, how do they work? What type of effect would you categorize these as, filter, envelope?

http://www.ehx.com/products/micro-synthesizer

[slacker]

How much do you want to know?

In terms of other pedals, it's a clean boost,  octave up, octave down and fuzz which can all be mixed together, they then go into something like a Boss Slow gear which lets you do volume swells. That then goes into an envelope filter or auto wah, the filter part is actually a bit more complicated than that, but that's very roughly what's going on.

[nocentelli]

Great pedal, sold mine years ago and have been plucking up the courage to DIY one ever since.

[The Rocket From The Tombs]

Thanks, that was pretty much what I wanted to know. I'm reading the articles on Geofex about the technologies of the FF, wah, etc n I was wondering about the synth pedal.

[nocentelli]

That's how the EHX microsynth works, it does some synthy sounds but is really just an octave up + octave down + fuzz + swell + filter effect - It's still the guitar/bass signal, just heavily processed. Other "synth" pedals actually use the guitar signal to trigger an oscillator, and track the guitar's pitch to control another synth voice. The most basic of this kinf (forgive me if I'm mistaken btw) is Escobedo'sd Uglyface (which I happen to have boxed up tonight). Other pedals, like the Boss SYB-3 (?) do this in a more sophisticated way, and have different waveshapes and envelope filtered voices that can be triggered, and the SYB-5 but it's digital.