envelope controlled fuzz looper idea thing.. advice welcomed humbly!!

[pinkjimiphoton]

so i was playing around this morning with my fuzzface. i am an idiot. last nite it was my big red kill switch.

why? cuz i plugged it in backwards. and that was before any imbibements. 

figured it was broke (to be fair, i was juggling way too many hats, and well, i only have one head, and it's kinda pointed at that)
so i opened it up and looked inside.

checked everything. that was when i figured out what i did last nite (epic facepalm) but it did give the guys a convenient kill switch to plug into y rig, lol...

anyways... wondering about this sound i came up with this morning involving a phaser and an echo and a fuzzface and i got this strange idea for a possibly "new" kind of sound or idea.. despite what some folks think, i am a very humble and stupid noob who lucks out sometimes and lets the smoke out sometimes.  so forgive me if my ramblings and questions seem dumb please..

i was wondering... can you use an envelope control to sweep ANY kind of variable resistance? could it be used to sweep a gain control on a fuzz? i mean so that you could potentially set it up where it swells the fuzz up as the note decays, right?
if you COULD do that, would it be possible to also have it light leds so you could use the old fake vactrol trick to swell in another effect as the note decays as well? having a maxxed out 2399 kinda delay with that ring moddish kinda sound it gets i'm thinking would be great, but if it was in a loop, you could put anything in there i'd assume...

so in effect, envelope controlled fuzz, with a vactrol section that swells in the second effect when the fuzz note starts to decay (and the envelope sweeps the fuzz upwards...

touch sensitive whatever is what i'm thinking.... would something like this be possible? has it been done before? does it make sense, or just my usual insane ramblings?

cuz the sound that inspired this idea is pretty cool... i have my cybertwin set up with the comp up high, and the noise gate fighting it, with a huge plate reverb, delay and phaser going... and the way it just happened to work out is that as the fuzz decays, the echo seems to swell in and strengthen it into a reinforced sound that then fades away in a very bowed like manner... and i was thinking the ideas poot forth above may be able to make a pedal that would do something similar...

i mean, you could put any part of your rig under envelope control. while with me, i was thinking fuzz cuz it's me, but i'm thinking having the fuzz sustain swelling in is so cool it would have to be integrated into it.

any ideas?  where does a crazed lithouanian learn how to make this happen? is it as simple as taking some kind of touch wah kinda deal and having it control the gain/fuzz rather than the filter pot? again, sorry for the dumb questions... but my simple mind has way too many usually overcomplicated ideas..

appreciate ideas, links, advice, history lessons too if i've missed something.

thanks!!

[nocentelli]

The simplest way to try it out on the breadboard would be an opamp fuzz, where the gain would be set by the size of the resistor in the feedback loop: Bigger resistance = more gain. If you had the guitar input split to an envelope detector and the fuzz circuit, the envelope detector could drive an LED, this could drive an LDR in the feedback loop. Big guitar signal = bright LED = LDR resistance goes low = fuzz gain goes low. As the signal fades, the LED fades, LDR resistance increases and gain goes up.

The major drawback I forsee is that with NO guitar signal, the gain would be massive, and so would hiss/noise.

[midwayfair]

NM

[Mark Hammer]

Given as how I'm half Lithuanian (mom's from a no longer-in-existence town near Kaunas/Kovno), I'll bite.

Envelope control of just about anything is feasible.  Every couple years here, I put in a plug for what I called a "talked-to" pedal.  Sidechain takes in a mic signal, splits it, and sends it to three different different envelope followers, one with a highpass filter before the rectifier, one with a lowpass, and one that is full-band.  Each rectifier/follower output drives an individual LED/LDR combo, and a different parameter.  You can control the parameters individually both by adjusting their sensitivity, and by adjusting what you do with your voice.  Say "ooooooohhh" and the lowpass section LED goes brighter.  Say "eeeee" and the highpass section goes brighter.  Say whatever you want loud enough, and the full-band LED glows brighter.  The time constants for each follower could be the same, or be different.  Your choice.

You can harness the LDRs those LEDs shine on to whatever you want: distortion-drive, filter centre-frequency, modulation rate, feedback amount, mix/morph, whatever.

The Source Audio Hot Hand 3 actually would let you do the same thing by moving your wrist around, and joysticks can do some of that too, but this circuit would let you pick away and do the same thing with your mouth.

[pinkjimiphoton]

The simplest way to try it out on the breadboard would be an opamp fuzz, where the gain would be set by the size of the resistor in the feedback loop: Bigger resistance = more gain. If you had the guitar input split to an envelope detector and the fuzz circuit, the envelope detector could drive an LED, this could drive an LDR in the feedback loop. Big guitar signal = bright LED = LDR resistance goes low = fuzz gain goes low. As the signal fades, the LED fades, LDR resistance increases and gain goes up.

The major drawback I forsee is that with NO guitar signal, the gain would be massive, and so would hiss/noise.

i think you're maybe overcomplicating my idea... i can see where with no guitar signal it would be an issue..
but i want to do it slightly different, and was thinking more like a simpler fuzz, and replacing the fuzz/gain pot with the variable resistance of the "vactrol"... in this case, it would be envelope filter>>fuzz, with the envelope sweeping up to make the fuzz gain go up...ideally, making enough signal to light the led as the note decays... or maybe somehow making the decay of the fuzz itself control the envelope.
with an opamp, i think it would be problematic as you state.. what i'm trying to describe tho, wouldn't be the opposite tho... i'd need the led to light up as the signal fades, like in a compressor... i think i'm explaining that part right... so as the light goes down, the resistance goes up, turning up the second effect... like... i know the led/ldr will decrease resistance when it's brighter, and increase as it fades out... is there a way to make that work the opposite?

NM

?

Given as how I'm half Lithuanian (mom's from a no longer-in-existence town near Kaunas/Kovno), I'll bite.

Envelope control of just about anything is feasible.  Every couple years here, I put in a plug for what I called a "talked-to" pedal.  Sidechain takes in a mic signal, splits it, and sends it to three different different envelope followers, one with a highpass filter before the rectifier, one with a lowpass, and one that is full-band.  Each rectifier/follower output drives an individual LED/LDR combo, and a different parameter.  You can control the parameters individually both by adjusting their sensitivity, and by adjusting what you do with your voice.  Say "ooooooohhh" and the lowpass section LED goes brighter.  Say "eeeee" and the highpass section goes brighter.  Say whatever you want loud enough, and the full-band LED glows brighter.  The time constants for each follower could be the same, or be different.  Your choice.

You can harness the LDRs those LEDs shine on to whatever you want: distortion-drive, filter centre-frequency, modulation rate, feedback amount, mix/morph, whatever.

The Source Audio Hot Hand 3 actually would let you do the same thing by moving your wrist around, and joysticks can do some of that too, but this circuit would let you pick away and do the same thing with your mouth.

wow, what a cool idea!!! but couldn't it be done with the guitar signal as input?

maybe i'm just thinking about this backwards...  in a comp, as the signal fades, the light comes up i thought... maybe i'm thinking backwards?

half litvak myself mark. i feel for ya.

[Mark Hammer]

Hell, you could use whatever you wanted as control input.  Certainly dividing the fingerboard up into a lower and upper half by suitable frequency division might let one morph from one tone to another as you work your way around the fingerboard.  For that matter, you could just pull up your favorite sports talk-radio show, plug into the sidechain and let the callers decide what your tone will be at the moment....or let your drummer decide, or screaming fans, or whatever.

That would actually be a neat project: a sort of half-a-vocoder.  The unit splits the control input into however many separate outputs, which can be assigned to detecting specific bands, whether overlapping or nonoverlapping.  It includes the LED and corresponding LDR, maybe strategic choice of LDR resistance range for different outputs, and sensitivity controls for each individual follower.  You have a bunch of stereo jacks, or maybe barrel jacks (anything with 2 contacts isolated from the chassis, for that matter) that can provide a varying resistance, and you patch them to wherever you need them to be. 

If it was a vocoder, they'd be controlling signal paths with the same passband as what the follower was detecting, but we don't have to use them for that.  We could use them to control anything we want that results from a simple resistance variation.

[pinkjimiphoton]

thanks mark,
that sounds like it would be a really cool idea for an interesting effect...

cuz yah, i was thinking something much simpler... basically using the fuzz decay to swell in another effect (i finally figured out how to describe what i was trying to portray)...

but that would be cool... you could add completley random controllers. neat idea.. where to start tho for more understanding for these kind of ideas?

i need something really basic to try and build on, i realize i won't be able to do much for a while... bought a house, and we're moving soon so i have to pack up a LOT of stuff... including all my electronic supplies.