Award Sounds

The BYOC Overdrive is a guitar fx pedal which comes in kit form. You receive all the parts, you download the instructions, then you assemble and solder it all together. It's based on old circuits and is meant to be a clone of the TS9 and TS808; essentially it's a tubescreamer pedals in a kit.

The Build

December was good; I received two FX pedal kits. They were the Build-Your-Own-Clone Tremolo and Build-Your-Own-Clone Overdrive.

I've already built a BYOC Triboost and was so impressed with it that they're now the first supplier I look to for pedals. I chose the BYOC Tremolo because I've yet to find a tremolo pedal I'm happy with. That might sound odd at first, but I wanted one that I could modify easily to fit my needs.

The Build

I like it when something just works, but I always feel a bit ambivalent when I can't really notice it working.

The Kit

In this case, I've just been using the Radial Engineering Reamping Kit. It consists of two main components (the J48 active phantom DI and the X-Amp amp driver) plus a power supply for the X-amp and a plastic box to hold it all in.

Plugging In for Re-Amping

I've been looking for a nice small electronics project so I took some time out to build a new guitar fx pedal. I've never really seen the point of a fuzz pedal, always seemed to deteriorate the signal too much for my liking. I do like boost pedals, especially nice clean ones that push the preamp just to the point where it starts to distort the signal nicely.

Triboost

However, I love putting an ordinary audio track through a plug-in and working through the presets, especially those presets that it's not designed for.

Mention an octaver to a musician, especially a guitarist, and you're heading for a conversation about Hendrix.

It can be used for other styles. So here's a quick trick for writing funk. Forget the bass when you start. I half-expected to get lynched, but bear with me, at least until the end.

Background

I like the old P-funk of Funkadelic and Parliament. I think what made me hear it more was the inclusion of a distorted guitar in a funk show. This was often played in sync with the bass guitar.

Setting the groove

I've talked about tremolo as a musical feature before, this time I want to go into more detail.

First things first, let's sort out the guitarists: I don't mean using the tremolo arm/whammy bar or whatever you want to call it ("handle" as my girlfriend called it - and no she won't be picking up my guitars for a while). The whammy bar creates a vibrato feature, not a tremolo. Vibrato alters pitch.

Amplitude

Take an old track and change the style of it.

I'm amazed how many tracks can be given more life by changing the style of music. I pick tracks that I've never fully finished to my satisfaction and apply a different musical style to them.

Identify the original style

What's wrong with the original track?

Create a random part and modify it until it becomes musical. I'll describe a few options for taking a random parts and the processes I use for making them more musical.

1. Creating the randomness

I set Logic on a 4 bar cycle and hit keys at random on my keyboard. I chose a clean electric piano sound since they highlight any dissonance. It's not truly random because it's difficult to unlearn how to play, but after cycling through the 4 bars a few times it did become a mess of notes.

I mentioned featuring multiple rhythms in the previous article on Musical Creativity. In this one, I'll introduce multiple speeds.

Different Speed
Similar to how different beats are accentuated due to the accents of the individual time signatures in the previous article, we can see a similar effect with varying the speed of one or more of the tracks.

To demonstrate, I'll take you through a basic sample song. Here's a screenshot of the song.