Solar Flare - pedal idea

[Peter Snowberg]

I just had a thought while looking at http://www.spaceweather.com, listening to "Mohamed" by The Dandy Warhols, and thinking about Zachary's reply in this thread about how neons on the edge will glow more consistently when a light is shown on them. Hmmm............

What if you.....

-> took an input signal and fed that to an envelope follower with switchable polarity that drove an incandescent lamp....

-> used a super high frequency switching supply to generate about 100V to power a larger neon pilot lamp (something more than an NE-2H)....

-> added an adjustable current source to limit the neon to an unstable current level....

-> monitored the actual neon current consumption via a series resistor and full wave precision rectifier....

-> used the neon current consumption to switch between two gain settings....

-> used the amplified/modulated signal to hammer a JFET.  :twisted:

If everything worked, depending on the envelope polarity I think you might be able to get notes that died off into "flicker" distortion which should sound different from a mis-biased opamp , or notes with a clean attack that quickly fall apart with a sort of random analog binary tremolo.

Another option would be to use the neon consumption to shunt the signal to ground. The first method would switch between two gains which are both >1.

[jrc4558]

Wow...

[squidsquad]

Once again Peter has a great idea...that I can barely comprehend...HA!
But hey...we have something in common:  I check the space weather also!

[Paul Marossy]

Flicker distortion, that's a new term. I wonder if it would sound like certain settings on the Fuzz Factory...