Boss Slowgear

[Paul Marossy]

Anyone build this from the info available at GGG? I'm thinking about building it, but I want to make sure that it really works before I spend a lot of time on it...

[Hal]

I was just posting that i have a different version on my computer, and I just realized its the same!

IIRC, links to this were posted on this forum about a year ago; I think it was verified there...http://www.diystompboxes.com/sboxforum/viewtopic.php?p=9564&highlight=#9564

finally found it.  Phew!  Good luck...I'm thinking of building this one myslef...I need money  :lol:

[Paul Marossy]

Thanks for the link, Hal.

Does anyone know of a soundclip for this pedal?

[Michael Allen]

I've also got a project for the Slow Gear. Han't constructed it yet..

Click my link

[YouAre]

If you're building this as an alternative to buying one, then there's a guyatone clone of it. It sounds pretty cool.

[Paul Marossy]

Michael Allen-

I would click your link if I could...

EDIT: Never mind. You meant your link on under your name, right?  :oops:

YouAre-

Guyatone makes a clone of it, huh? Do you know how much they go for?

EDIT: Never mind. I just found the Guyatone website. $90 doesn't seem like a bad price. I'll probably cost nearly that much to make my own or at least I would save myself a lot of time...

[Rodgre]

I've said it once, I've said it a million times. I have a Slow Gear and I find the Paia Gator kit to be MORE flexible and sound just as good.

I wanted a Slow Gear for years, and finally got one and I was pretty dissappointed with it actually.

At least with the Gator kit, you have an external input to make syncable tremolo effects. it's also much cheaper.

Roger

[mrsage]

I bought a used Guyatone one for $50 shipped a while back.

Takes some tweaking and patience to get it to do what you want...

[Paul Marossy]

Rodgre-

I think I remember reading about your recommendation for the PAIA Gator kit. How do I get one of those kits?

[mrsage]

http://www.paia.com/guitarfx.htm



How do these differ from the Slow Gear? I know one obvious difference is three knobs vs. the Slow Gear's two (more tweaking = better, right?!)

Are they relatively comparable, though? I'm slightly wary because they call it a noise gate...Has anyone tried it?

[Rodgre]

I'm slightly wary because they call it a noise gate...Has anyone tried it?

I have both the Boss and the Paia. I think the Paia does the same thing, just better.

Don't fear the fact that they call it a noise gate. That's exactly what the slow gear is.

Think of it like this:
a noise gate shuts the volume down until your input signal passes a threshold. Well, the slow gear, gator, etc put a super slow attack time on the gate, so it swells up from nothing. Then when you stop playing, the gate shuts back down.

That being the case, almost any noise gate circuit could be modified to have a super super slow attack time, right?

Roger

[Paul Marossy]

It sounds to like the simple solution is get the Gator kit.
I think I may just do that...  

[RickL]

I'll second Rodgre's recommendation. I also have both and the Gator is every bit as good as the Slow Gear.

There are a couple of other similar pedals with schematics posted. The one called Attack Delay (I believe) works about as well as the Gator and Slow Gear. I may have the name wrong or may be confusing it with another one (Attack/Decay maybe?) so if you're going to try one of the others post first and I'll try to confirm which one actually works well.

[Torchy]

This one ? Its an interesting build  :wink:

http://server5.uploadit.org/files/Torchy-variableattackdelay.jpg

[RickL]

Nope, not that one. I did build that one but it didn't work as well for me as the one I'm thinking of. Let me search a bit and see if I can find it.

edit: this is it I think. From Mark Hammer's site, called the String Damper.  http://hammer.ampage.org/

edit: the link doesn't go directly to it. You'll have to scroll a bit to find it.

[Torchy]

Got it ... http://ampage.org/hammer/files/StringDamper.PDF

May have to build this ... just got some 13700 trans op-amps as well  :wink:

[Mark Hammer]

The thing to remember about ANY pedal of this sort, whether explicitly intended to be a noise gate (and only coincidentally a slow attack effect), or explicitly intended to be a slow attack, is that accurate and adaptive detection of the onset and offset of a note or chord is essential to pleasing performance.  Looking over the schems that have been posted of different versions of such an effect, both old and new, I don't really see anything that seems to have the kind of onset/offset detection design that would unconditionally deliver reliable performance no matter how you play or what you play.  What this means is that although they will "work", you will have to be mindful of what you feed them, and work around their quirks.  That may be easy to do or exasperating, depending on what it is you had planned.

For me, the "ideal" all-analog fade-in hasn't been made yet.  The "ideal" would have variable slope of rise time, not just variable time to rise.  Additionally, it would have some means to tailor not only the sensitivity or threshold for triggering a gating on, but some means to tailor what sort of content the gate is responding to.  For instance, the Slow Gear's envelope follower seems geared towards full-bandwidth sensitivity, meaning that low-frequency hand vibrations contaminate the envelope circuit as much as finger glisses do.  There is no user-accessible means to alter the frequency sensitivity of the triggering circuitry.  There is also no means to adapt the rise time to the speed of notes being played so that you can get shorter attack times if you play more notes (something that digital delay-based reverse will ALWAYS have over analog emulation).  Finally, true tape reverse mimics the way that a) harmonic content normally declines after initial attack (implying that treble would fade in as the signal goes "backwards" or fades in), and b) genetle vibrato usually sets in if a note is held a while (meaning that a hint of vibrato should be there at the start of the reverse sweep).

In support of the Gator, though, I will say that it is reasonably priced, is intended to be a noise gate that is readily adaptable to slow attack purposes (2 effects in one), is pretty flexible and modable (what Anderton-designed device isn't?), and PAiA always provides greats support and documentation.  I'd be very surprised if someone with some chops couldn't make it behave optimally for their instrument and playing style.

[Paul Marossy]

So, that brings me to a question:
How does the Gator do with chords, is it one of the "single notes only" kind of effects?

[Mark Hammer]

It's a noise gate, and is not mono in the sense that octave-dividers are.  Like any noise gate, you set the threshold for what you want to trigger a gate-on.  If you want it to respond to chords only, set the threshold higher.  If you want it to respond to Stanley Jordan type hammer-ons, set the threshold real low.  There will be no tonal difference between the two.

The problem with any noise gate is going back and forth between thresholds suitable to chords and single notes.  If you want to avoid finger movements triggering swells, and set the threshold higher so that you need to smack at least a couple of wound strings to elicit a rise, you can pretty much forget gentle emotive single-note picking of unwound strings on the higher frets to result in signal passing unless you tinker with the sensitivity/threshold control.

That's what I meant by "adaptive" - something that "thinks" along with the player.

[Paul Marossy]

The problem with any noise gate is going back and forth between thresholds suitable to chords and single notes.

That was the main weakness of the noise gate that I once owned years ago. In spite of that, I still think it (the Gator) could be used in combination with a couple of things to get some really cool sounds.