Capitalist Death Cult Surf Nicaragua Vibes+Verbs (optical pitch vibrato and actual spring tank reverb)

When building a reverb effect, you have basically 3 or 4 ways you can do it. The most common of those are:

1) the Belton brick, which is just three PT2399 delay chips with really short delay times hard-wired in and sealed in plastic.

2) the Spin FV-1 - which is a surface mount chip specifically designed for effect pedal applications and can manipulate as many as 8 DSP algorithms. So basically, software modeling.

3) ACTUAL SPRING TANK - which is what I did here. Accutronics makes these small-ish plastic tanks with two springs and transducers that function just as the spring tanks that come in guitar amplifiers do.

These tanks are nothing new - Spaceman Effects made a pedal with one in it. So did Danelectro. 

This particular circuit that I've got in this box is based on a DIY/kit that BJFE offers. I changed out the recommended transistors to get this thing sounding a little more "vintage amp" (lo-fi, or "crappier", if you prefer). I also removed one of the dwell controls and replaced it with a fixed resistor. I then added a tone control that is based on the ones found in Big Muff circuits and added a recovery stage and master volume.

This verb will do "full wet" if you max the dwell and mix controls, and with the tone and master volume added, it will start to do this really cool (to my ears anyway) self-oscillation that will push and pull with your playing but never run away with your signal.

That's the second half of this effect. We're doing this in reverse order today...

The FIRST half is an effect based on the Magnavibe by Bigfoot FX - it's an actual pitch vibrato circuit designed after the ones that came in old Magnatone amps. The light dependent resistors or "LDR" passives are what make or break this circuit and I had to do some searching in order to find ones with a wide enough sweep between light and dark to get the vibrato right. But I think I pulled it off. I also added an additional input buffer to the vibrato circuit based on the one that comes in the Klon Centaur - mostly because it's been my experience that the Klon buffer makes modulation, especially modulation that accompanies reverb and delay, sound more lush and three dimensional.

So: old-school optical pitch vibrato into ACTUAL spring tank reverb finished off with a low pass-to-high pass-style tone control and master volume.

As far as the enclosure is concerned: it is a 1590J (about 4" deep and 6" wide) and it literally cannot be any smaller. This is as tight of a box as I can use and still get the tank itself to fit. So, no, can't do it in a smaller box for you if pedalboard real estate is an issue, unfortunately. Sorry.

This effect uses an Incandenza relay clickless bypass switch - and it is true bypass, so no reverb trails. Which was kind of a compromise when I was getting this together because I like to have trails in bypass whenever possible - but the way the circuits work together just wouldn't permit it.

Handbuilt by me on stripboard!