square wave tranceformer

[mirza]

is there such thing? that would transform guitar signal into square wave?

[niftydog]

Que?

You can convert a guitar signal into a square wave, but it has nothing to do with transformers.

Have a look down this page for the PWM. This is an extreme example. A lot of distortion type effects take the approach of squaring the audio wave.

[R.G.]

Sure. A comparator will provide square waves (rectangular, actually) from any input.

[mirza]

comparator?

[niftydog]

comparator?

special configuration of an op amp, used literally to compare two voltages.

[gez]

Crude as hell (more circuitry will give you more options), but it works.

Most op-amps will work fine but ones with a CMOS output have a tendency to try and bias up when in their quiescent state (bipolar outputs will slam into one of the rails and stay there) so you actually get some dynamics (very slight), which is cool!

You can give the first op-amp some gain, which will help things along sustain wise, but at the expense of splutter/instability.  

Can't remember why that 470R resistor on the output is there.  Probably unnecessary...

Tranceformer would be a cool name for a phaser.