In praise of blenders

[Mark Hammer]

So I took a break from soldering and decided to plug in and conduct some experiments.

I made myself a blender pedal.  It uses a simple 1-in-2-out splitter (Jack O's FET circuit) and a rather boilerplate 2-in-1-out op-amp mixer, with a phase-invert switch for one of the mixer inputs.  So, a mono output signal that can utilize two parallel signals mixed together The whole thing can be bypassed and revert to a clean through-signal with a stompswitch. 

I plugged an Arion and CE-2 chorus pedal into my blender and ran them in parallel. Two unsynced chorus pedals mixed together provide a thick sound. I love my Behringer DC-2 clone, but even that one has some perceptible back-and-forth because the two delay chips it uses are counterswept by a single LFO. As one chip goes high the other goes low. When the choruses are completely usynced, though, that sense of predictable motion is gone, and you end up with three "voices" running just a little staggered.

When I flipped the phase-invert switch an interesting result occurred. Chorus pedals, you'll recall, combine a dry signal and a time-modulated wet signal. When I inverted the phase of one of the pedals, and mixed them in roughly equal proportions, the dry from each chorus tended to cancel out. Not entirely, mind you, but enough that the vibrato-like pitch-wobble became much more evident.

Next, I plugged two '60s-style fuzzes I had made into the two send/return channels. Bear in mind that, although the harmonics generated tend to stand out quite strongly, underneath it all is the note fundamental Again, when placed out of phase with each other, there was some cancellation of the fundamental between the two fuzzes, yielding a tone that was somewhat thinner and "struzzier" sounding.

Parallel processing is interesting, especially when combined with phase inversion.

[Fancy Lime]

Yes! Will It Blend for pedals! More of that please! I have no time to build stuff at the moment and I desparately need a substitute! Reading about this sort of experiment is just the thing! Also: I am using way too much exclamation points when I'm excited!

Andy

[Mark Hammer]

At least you're not using way too many aubergine emojis. 

There have been a spate of utility-pedals like this recently: the Xotic X-Blender, Gigrig Wetter, Earthquaker Devices Swiss Thing, Empress Effects Buffer+, and more.  Finally, folks are catching up to what Craig Anderton was preaching over 35 years ago in Guitar Player.  And that is that parallel processing is a real and desirable thing.

I've been saying of late in a variety of places that recent years have seen a lot of what used to be post-production processing move to the pedalboard.  Things we could only previously do on the "other side of the glass" are now available at our feet.  And blender pedals are one of the tools for accomplishing that.

You've been a busy and productive lad, Andy.  Feel no shame at taking a little time to cogitate.  I'm confident it will yield great returns. 

[Fancy Lime]

Thanks for the kind words Mark! My emoji repertoir consists almost exclusively of two different kinds of smily, and , and I think that is about as much as I can handle...

BTW, calling it "aubergine" is the most delightfully Canadian thing I've read in a while. Reminds me that it must have been around this time of year that Ive last been to Ottawa because that's when I first tried "pumpkin spice" in my coffe at a Timmy Ho's.

Say hi to the geese and moose (who should be called meese) and loons for me,
Andy

[Mark Hammer]

I used "aubergine" in deference to our European forum members.  Normally, I'd just call it an eggplant.

One of my teaching jobs resulted in contact with a number of Indigenous students who had migrated south from the James Bay region to attend community college.  I was introduced to the concept of "goose week" by them, and a teaching colleague who had been at the school longer than I.  Each year, at a predictable time and point in the migration cycle, the students would pack up and go back home up north for a week.  There, they'd point their shotguns in the sky when a flock flew by, and fill up the family (or community) freezer with the geese than would fall.  I guess it's hard to miss a target when the target is 100 metres wide.  Once the freezers were full, they'd come back to town for class.

Should you have cause to be out my way again, drop me a note, and I'll be sure to provide some hospitality.

[bluebunny]

Normally, I'd just call it an eggplant.

Never understood this one.  Can you imagine the look on the chicken's face when it laid one??

[GibsonGM]

Is "Aubergine" anything like Poutine?   

[Fancy Lime]

@Mark
I have no travel plans right now but I'll be sure to remember to buy you a beer or coffee, should the occasion arise. You are one of the people primarily responsible for me getting into the whole diy stompbox thing, along with R.G. Keen, Jack Orman, and Tim Escobedo. As I'm sure is true for many if not most people who learned all this stuff from the interwebs. So I feel like I should be the one offering the hospitality. No worries, I won't tell my wife that it's your fault

I only ever heard an eggplant called "aubergine" in English during my time in Canada. I lived in Montreal, though, so that may not be 100% representative for the English-as-a-first-language rest of Canada.

@Marc
What a f***ing glorious chicken!

Andy

[Ben N]

No, no! The chicken doesn't lay an eggplant, it lays an egg, which is then planted.
As for blenders, I can only agree.

[Fancy Lime]

So which of these is the eggplant smoothie and which one is the poutine smoothie? I'm opposed to putting live chickens in a blender, though.

Andy

[iainpunk]

i have used parallel processing for a band where i used a clean octave down on one path and a fuzz, an overdrive and a phaser on the other side.

at home, i like to put a mid rangey light drive on one side and a high gain fuzz with a 100% wet reverb and a phaser (yes first reverb than phaser) in the other to get a nice moving but gritty texture underneath a light gain guitar sound.

[tubegeek]

I'm opposed to putting live chickens in a blender, though.

They will TOTALLY gum up your Bass-o-Matic.