Studio Electronics Wolftone fuzz

[Mark Hammer]

Stumbled onto this thing, and found a video demonstrating some pleasing and interesting "blooming" sounds.  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2887748814800393926
Looked at this e-bay ad for one, and the picture of the board looked both interesting and vaguely familiar.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220465408362

Maybe it was the fact that I threw together an Escobedo Jawari pedal the other day, and was looking at some guy's posting about trouble he was having with building a pedal from my own "Chaos" schematic, but seeing a small Mouser transformer with diodes on either side, and a dual op-amp with a quartet of diodes on one side and duet on the other, captured my attention.  I'm not trying to impugn anyone's reputation.  Rather, the op-amp double-clipper idea of the Hammer Chaos fuzz is interesting, and the transformer+GE-based clipping circuit of the Jawari is also interesting.  Throwing them both into the mix might be even MORE interesting.

Looking at Studio Electronics own description of the controls and achievable sounds, sounds an awful lot like a Chaos and a Jawari jammed together.  Especially when they start talking about "filter sweep feel" and "ring modulator-like tones".  The Jawari works by producing octaving that peters out in a way that introduces a filter-like sweep.  Feeding it a high-gain compressed overdrive, and being able to adjust the petering out could prove interesting.  Once my Jawari was done, I plugged my GEOFEX Great Cheddar into it, and was very pleased with the tones attainable.  If the unit really IS something like a tweaked double clipper, followed by a FWR (note the quartet of 1N914s in the lower left near the transformer) and Jawari circuit, then that suggests some sonically interesting hybrids to explore.

In any event, enough suspicion on my part.  Anyone ever tried out one of these things who'd care to comment? 

[chemosis]

i bought a malekko chaos a while back and love it because of the synthy tones u get when rolling back tone on bridge pickup like the video. this pedal seems to operate very similar to the crowther audio prunes and custard.  you can hear the modulation is very similar too and they both achieve that kinda hollow synth sound at certain settings. i also wonder if the studio electronics chaos was modelled after a brassmaster. it sounds like a beefed up brassmaster and that would be a great comparison which im thinking about doing. malekko stopped making clones of the chaos a while back but there are leftovers.

[Mark Hammer]

Listening to the Pro Guitar Shop demo, it sounds a lot like the Scrambler+/D-Scrambler pedal I made, albeit a lot finer-tuned.  The thing I made has a modified overdrive (a mélange of the DOD250 and Distortion+) as the front end, feeding an Ampeg Scrambler.  The Scrambler itself lacked any sort of sensitivity control, so the front end's volume control took care of that.  Being able to control how hard the Scrambler is pushed can yield a wider variety of tones, including the "bloom" that occurs when it is pushed very hard and sort of implodes on itself.

AS for ringmodulator sounds, well those are produced by just about analog octave-up unit using a phase splitter.  Just the way the math works out when you bend notes on one of those.  I was doing it 20 minutes ago on a Foxx Tone Machine clone.

I recommend building one for yourself; just a Distortion+ (w/SI diodes and more bass) into a Scrambler.  Like I say, the Malekko sounds like they've gone a bit beyond that and tweaked it to easier dialability.

[chemosis]

thanks for the reply mark because the chaos is a pedal often ignored. i thought the scrambler sounded similair but the chaos gets that hollow synthy sound similar to the prunes and custard. you have to roll back tone and use bridge humbucker of course. but both are intermodulated. does this mean 2 circuits with one modulating the other?? u can hear the modulation and that has to be a big reason for why the chaos gets a more analog synth sound than other octave up fuzzes. i also thought the scrambler and gus smileys octave sick box, but these dont intermodulate do they??? oh one last thing. i find alot of commonalites between the brassmaster more than another pedal but its not extreme like it dosent add those few extra harmonics that the chaos does. is the chaos derived from the scrambler or brassmaster and how similar is the brassmaster?? alright im watching the video now. i need someone to trace my chaos. no one makes them anymore. would you know anyone willing to trace the chaos??

[rutabaga bob]

He's referring to his own pedal called the 'Chaos', not a commercial unit.

[Mark Hammer]

Pick any analog octave-up fuzz you want, and bend a string while you do a double stop.  You're bending a note up, but you will hear a sideband product go down.  That's why the Dan Armstrong octave-up fuzz is called the Green Ringer - because it sounds like a ring modulator...sometimes.  That sideband product, however, is completely absent if you simply fret and pick, without bending, so it would be wrong to say that it is a ring modulator.

Of course the extent to which a given pedal is susceptible to producing those sounds will vary, butyou'll get them from any octave-up unit.

[chemosis]

No  i am talking about the malekko chaos. ITS different than most octave-up because u can have 2nd and 3rd harmonics added in with the fundamental of coarse.You can hear some modulation in the sound. ive owned other octave up like the superfuzz, foxx ,tone machine, rojer mayer but nothing can achieve that hollow sounding squarewave esq sound it gets at certain settings from 12 fret up and tone rolled back.  He gets close to the sound im talking about at about 2:30. also at 3:06. U have to use the 3rd harmonic to get it. im doing a youtube video now for this. my channel is timm ward. Here is the offical chaos video.its very good and explains a bit.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzgaKUIbGnc

Malekko WOLFTONE CHAOS official factory video

[chemosis]

i did youtube demo on the chaos a while back. its on my youtube channel timm ward.






https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWJ_VAij32E

Malekko Chaos

[Pedalhead]

Pick any analog octave-up fuzz you want, and bend a string while you do a double stop.  You're bending a note up, but you will hear a sideband product go down.  That's why the Dan Armstrong octave-up fuzz is called the Green Ringer - because it sounds like a ring modulator...sometimes.  That sideband product, however, is completely absent if you simply fret and pick, without bending, so it would be wrong to say that it is a ring modulator.

Of course the extent to which a given pedal is susceptible to producing those sounds will vary, butyou'll get them from any octave-up unit.

I used to have an original Green Ringer in those funny boxes that you plug direct into guitar. I tried it out on my brother's Elka organ and when playing an octave scale C to C it would change some of the notes in the scale to a different note altogether. Maybe there were harmonics in the organ tone that caused that effect, but you couldn't bend notes of course.