Deli #54 - Bodega, Brooklyn Stompbox Exhibit and Synth Expo 2018

It's a good time to be a sonically adventurous guitarist.
The market is flooded with effect pedals from
manufacturers big and small, and the range of tones
and processing power on offer is nothing short of jaw
dropping. Stomp boxes are no longer limited to one or two
decent-sounding effects and a few knobs and switches. Digital
signal processing (DSP) has made it possible to pack
high-fidelity sounds and features once reserved for studio-quality
rack gear into even the most compact of pedals.
The further we go down this road, the more guitar effect pedals
are becoming, both literally and figuratively, like synthesizers.
Literally, because many tone-bending features once
reserved for synthesists, like arpeggiation, bit crushing and
mIDI functionality, are now available to guitarists in stomp
boxes. Figuratively, because an increasing number of pedal
makers are creating products with deep feature sets and
highly tweakable functions that put them on par with patchable
modular synthesizers.
Consider Chase Bliss Audio, makers of distortion, delay,
phaser, chorus, tremolo and EQ pedals: not only are the
company’s stompboxes studded with control knobs and
switches that can route the circuits in dozens of ways, they’re
even outfitted with external DIP switches that allow the user
to customize a host of parameters.
Perhaps the only question is “What took so long?” This day
has been coming ever since the transistor revolutionized
electronics in the 1960s. That innovation gave birth almost
simultaneously to small and affordable effect pedals and the
electronic synthesizer. The timing of these developments
may have been coincidental, but there’s no denying that the
two industries have fed from the same trough and enjoyed a
mutually beneficial association.
guitar effect pedals and synthesizers have more in common
than you may think. The groundbreaking synths that Bob
moog introduced in the 1960s had many features that eventually
worked their way over to the effect pedal community. The
novelty of moog’s devices is that he used voltage control to
tell the synth what note to play, to trigger the envelopes that
determined how the filter’s cutoff frequency and amplitude
changed over time, and to create effects like vibrato, wah
and tremolo. Together, the components of his voltage-controlled
system formed the basis for subtractive synthesis,
in which a harmonically rich waveform is passed through a
resonant filter and treated with envelopes and low-frequency
oscillators, or LFOs, which produce wavelengths below the
audible range. It’s called “subtractive” because the filter is
applied in a way that removes some of the waveform’s character
in order to alter its timbre.
many early guitar effects used elements of subtractive synthesis
as well as voltage control. Consider the wah pedal, a highly
resonant filter whose cutoff frequency is swept manually by the
user, or the auto wah, a voltage-controlled filter whose cutoff
frequency is controlled by an envelope that’s triggered by an
audio signal. As for tremolo pedals and vibrato boxes—they’re
nothing more than tiny circuits that apply a sine or triangle
LFO waveform to an input signal. Under the circumstances,
it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that synth maker Oberheim
briefly produced the Voltage Controlled Filter auto-wah for
guitarists in the 1970s, or that effect maker Electro-Harmonix
created the 1980 mini-Synthesizer keyboard. Though product
crossovers like these were uncommon, the shared technologies
of the effect and synth industries made them possible.
Of course, guitarists have been using distortion, overdrive
and fuzz for longer than synthesizers have been around. As it
happens, all of these are forms of distortion synthesis, which
creates complex timbres from relatively simple waveforms.
For that matter, when you run a fuzz pedal into a wah, you’re
combining distortion synthesis with subtractive synthesis.
And let’s not forget additive synthesis, the technique of combining
the fundamental tone with its harmonic partials. This is
how pipe organs and electronic organs synthesize complex
sounds. An octave pedal is a simple form of additive synthesis
that uses frequency dividers or doublers to create a synthesized
version of the original note. Dividing that signal produces
a tone one or two octaves below the fundamental, while
the deli Spring 2018 25