MIC

I didn’t really intend to make this a product.

I was getting a few parts, and needed to spend more to meet the minimum shipping requirements. I saw some parts for a condenser mic and thought it would be cool to build something like this.

I made one for me and was having a lot of fun with it, so I mentioned it on my Instagram and a lot of people were interested, so I decided to refine the design a bit and make it available.

Frankly, it’s a weird thing. It is very sensitive, and has a fairly flat EQ. It takes a 9V power supply, and the output jack is for a regular instrument cable.

I’ve not really used many microphones, and didn’t really want to spend the time or money buying something when I had no intention of using it traditionally - I wanted to be able to use effects, and every time I look at DI boxes and the like, I end up feeling kinda dumb. This mic works more or less like you’d expect a guitar to - you just plug it in and play around, so there’s really no learning curve to it.

At the time of this writing, I don’t have any in stock, but I think The Melody Maker in Clinton, MA may have some (you might need to go to their physical shop though, I’m not totally sure).

When I was designing and building this, I was really obsessed with trying to make new things with PCBs from other projects. This is built with an Earth v2 PCB, but basically every value is changed, some parts are added, and some other removed.

I’m not really sure about building anymore of these. Let me know if you want one and I will see what I can do!

AUSTRALIA

In case you haven’t heard, Dogman Devices is now located in Australia!

You may be wondering why, and frankly, it is more challenging to come up with reasons not to have left the US than to remain, at least personally. There are some business reasons which are compelling (most of my audience and people who buy pedals live in the US, for one). But first and foremost, I am a person, and my business is secondary to that.

I’m not aiming for this business to be my primary income anymore. I’ve found that doing that actually takes a lot of the fun out of the process. I want to build pedals that I want to use, that inspire me to make music. That doesn’t always overlap with what other people want to buy. But I just don’t find it all that fun or interesting to base my designs around what people want to buy. If people want the same things that I do, cool. If not, that’s cool, too. I have been doing small runs of things for a while now and that is how I intend to do things from now on.

Which brings me back to Australia/why: I’m going to law school!

As much as I enjoy art, which, for me, includes building pedals, there is tension between making art for the sake of art and self-expression, and making art to draw attention to issues which are important to me, imbuing things with some particular message in an effort to bring about change I would like to see in the world. I don’t really have the privilege to disengage from politics, and if you haven’t noticed, things aren’t exactly going great in the world these days.

Generally speaking, the inspiration for some new sound doesn’t tend to pair well with the sort of messages I’d like to send about the sorts of issues which give me existential dread and anxiety. I then feel this pressure to tie them together, and the work suffers as a result.

The fact is that I’m trying to create new musical textures, the music itself is a better avenue for having a deeper meaning, at least for some people. Which isn’t to say my pedals don’t, but they aren’t exactly upfront, and treating them as products doesn’t help. But at the end of the day, I just don’t like having any real monetary motivation behind any of the art that I make, and yet I must not only eat but continue to exist in this world. There is so much more to life than profitability, and changing the focus of passion projects to monetization is just not something I want to do anymore.

So basically, I’m going back to school to get the sort of education that will allow me to get the sort of day job that I want, and may even allow me to address some of my concerns without feeling like I’m putting some constraints or restrictions on my art. Over the last year, I’ve had a few day jobs and they just weren’t a good fit for me. And, broadly speaking, the US no longer seems like a good fit for me or for my wife. We’ve both lived abroad before, and were ready to do so again.

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I’ve got plenty of pedal ideas I want to pursue, and after I get settled into my new apartment, I’ll get back to building. I’m going to be exploring some new ways of building things to cut down on build times, too!

In the meantime, you can find a ton of my pedals at The Melody Maker in Clinton, MA (they are also a coffee shop! Find their site here and Reverb site here - they are awesome people and have the widest selection of my pedals - if you are looking for something of mine and don’t see it on their site, contact them!), Gear Hero HQ still should have a handful of things, and Guitar Center still have some things, too.

BLUE ROSE

Blue Rose is the third installment of repurposed circuit boards.

This one doesn’t actually change that many components, but the changes make a significant difference - I don’t think this pedal sounds much like Fire Fuzz at all, even though it is built on the same circuit board. It is a much stranger sound.

Unlike Fire, this tone control does more than subtle changes. The tone control on Fire is most noticeable on a bass where any changes to treble stand out a bit more because there isn’t as much in the signal to begin with. Blue Rose takes things much further, going from cutting almost all treble to boosting it to the point of strangeness.

Unlike Fire, the way to “clean” it up is to actually stick another dirt pedal in front of it, and then roll the gain knob on Blue Rose down. Because it is gated (it needs a good bit of signal to actually do its thing), boosting the signal before hand will make it less gated.

Another significant difference between this and Fire is the additional switch and knob which controls it. What this does is a bit contradictory and confusing, which is why I typically just say you don’t ever want to know what it does. It is a feedback loop, but because the effect is gated, it doesn’t really create feedback. Because it essentially runs the effect through itself infinitely, it also means the tone control becomes a higher order filter (instead of one filtering stage, there are effectively infinite filtering stages) and so everything the filter does is exaggerated. When you turn this black knob up, the gating element is increased at the same time as the amount of signal fed back into the effect, so on the one hand, it is wanting to just feedback and howl, but on the other, notes get harder to sustain. The result is just plain strange, and I’ve never come across anything like it before. It is a unity of opposites.

While Fire (and most other dirt pedals) respond to different kinds of pick-ups differently, Blue Rose is not subtle about this, especially when in the black mode. The traces of feedback that make it into the signal are set to a different tone in part due to the pick-up used (on a strat-style guitar, that means you can really change how things sound on the fly). Adding another dirt pedal before it will change how that sounds as well, and what each thing will do is not exactly predictable.

And finally, for the real component nerds, compared to Fire, Blue Rose has: two different transistors (both silicon, but one a high gain and the other a low gain one) instead of two silicon transistors of the same build, it has an LED and a Schottky diode instead of a silicon and a germanium one (the center LED is this clipping diode, and it lights up when it is clipping. Softer playing will not make the LED clip), and the resistor-capacitor network that is the tone control has some important values changed. Also, some of the noise filtering components are removed - without these, Fire actually picks up radio stations, but these signals aren’t strong enough to get through Blue Rose’s gate.

All of this together creates an all-around unnatural sound, a kind of fuzz I have not heard in anything else.

BLIZZARD

Second up in my series of repurposing circuit boards is Blizzard.

This uses the same circuit layout as Go Fly A Kite, but most of the components values are changed. The result is a distinctly different frequency response (GFAK is more clean-tone oriented, Blizzard will gladly play with the nastiest of fuzzes), much greater range of repeats (goes into self-oscillation, from a gentle hum to a punch in the face), and much longer delay times. Despite the circuit board, when in the shorter range, it sounds more like Air without the fuzz.

The longest delay time (about three seconds) works almost like a dirty looper. The repeats get distorted - sort of like a tape delay, but with a gramophone or wax cylinder.

For me, this does everything that I want a delay to do. You can make music using only the pedal, you can get echoes, loop-like behavior suitable for Frippertronics-type things, it can go from subtle to overwhelming. What else could you want?

CITRINE VOLCANO

This is the first of a number of experiments.

The Elements series was, at least partially, guided by the idea of making circuits with topologies which would be easy to repurpose into new circuits. In other words, the basic layout of each circuit can easily modified in a number of ways to yield distinctly new sounds through.

The Citrine Volcano is the first circuit which is deliberately built on PCB designed for an Element pedal. In this case, it is Earth.

The frequency response is a bit different, but the primary differences are the asymmetrical clipping, hard-wired gain setting, and a switch which changes one key component to a completely different kind of component, itself changing the circuit to one much more similar to Chum than Earth.

In detail: the input and output capacitors are reduced, there is a different transistor at the heart, the clipping diodes have very different forward voltages (making for very asymmetric clipping), and the switch replaces the resistor between the transistor’s collector and base with a diode. This small switch changes the overall sound significantly.

Through experimenting with what specifically to change, there seemed to be too many good options to only make one variant. So, I decided to just make a handful of these and move onto to the next design.

Specially, there are six of these, and no more will be made.

Citrine mode has more in common with Earth than the Volcano mode. The asymmetry of the signal is more pronounced, and it is noticeably louder than the Volcano. It is touch-sensitive, meaning rolling back guitar (or bass) volume will reduce the amount of gain. The clipping is the easiest to hear difference compared to Earth.

The Volcano mode is similar yet distinct from the Chum circuit. Compared to Citrine, it is gated, and more saturated. Rolling back instrument volume will make it even more gated. The frequency response (much more bass) is the easiest to hear difference compared to Chum.