small stone with more stages v tau pipe

[nepalnt21]

i really like the timbre of the small stone phaser (even more than the ross, at least as far as the videos on youtube present to my ears)... but my ultimate desired phaser is the haible tau pipe phaser (as shown in the mrdigi2t videos); it just has a super over-the-top and throaty (almost like it's dry heaving and singing at the same time) quality that i need in my life.

if i build a small stone, and just make it a 20 stager... will it get me in the ballpark? or do i really need the exact tau phaser (or arp quadra phaser with more stages) topology?

i'll prolly try it one day, either way, because i just love the small stone... and more (stages) = better, right ?

thanks

[idy]

I think there is a "precision" aspect to the tau, all those stages are extremely focused. Small stones, univibes, phase 90 (all four stages) have a softness and defused quality. Bad Stone, with 6, is a more focused sound maybe because the invertor used to control things is matched MOSFETs. I am trying to get my bi-phase clone working (picking right matched LDRs) and that will give 16 stages...

[Kevin Mitchell]

and more (stages) = better, right ?

Yes and no. After so many stages the effect is very much unnoticeable for guitar use. From experience it seems to top out at around 8 stages with a guitar signal. That's typically why higher-stage phasors like the moogerfooger MF-103 (6 and 12 stage options) are steered towards keyboard players and misc. studio equipment.

A great OTA phaser to breadboard would be the Causality 4 - schematic is on this forum. You may like that just as much as the Small Stone.

You may find that much of the mojo is from the LFO swell and not so much due to an abundance of phase stages.

[nepalnt21]

so the tau phaser would sound pretty much as throaty, vowelly, and throwupy as it does... even with only 8 stages?

[StephenGiles]

I built a 16 stage Smallstone on breadboards back in about 1989, using all the CA3094s I had. Luckily the R & D department where I was working slipped in an order for some! What I found was that although it produced a deep phase, the amount of noise was unacceptable so I scrapped it.

[Mark Hammer]

One of the things one often sees in phasers with more than 4 stages is some treble cut in one of the stages, via a feedback-loop cap, to offset the accumulation of hiss via regeneration/feedback.

[nepalnt21]

thanks for the responses, i guess the only way to find out is to try it out myself.

worst that will happen is i have a breadboarded phaser, the components of which i end up recycling for other projects.

my ultimate goal will be to breadboard something like the tau pipe phaser.

i just can't get enough of that sound, the pipe resonance and the guttural thing... reminds me of the 'magic groan' tube toys i had when i was young.

(edit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdNJfbPnlQ8

this thing ^^^

i cannot get enough of that sound.

really, i love any instrument that gets vowelly as hell (maybe i need a formant filter pedal)