The Mothership

Category: Pedals

I found this old Apple Airport base station behind my parents' filing cabinet a while ago. It had been faithfully serving up a defunct wifi network for about 5 years since the telephone company technician installed a new wifi router for my parents, and didn't bother turning off the old one. Thanks Telstra technician!

Given the UFO kinda look of it, I figured it needed a UFO kinda pedal sound. The Theremin Fuzz from Parasitstudio was perfect. It makes sci-fi/horror sounds at their best.

I used a rotary switch for the octave selector, and found some UFO shaped knobs to go with the theme.

To add to the fun, I've also done a custom echo circuit, with speed warping and feedback buttons. Another rotary switch to select between the theremin, the echo, or both chained together. I've also put in a small circuit to control the LEDs, so when the two effects are chained, both LEDs light up. Magic!

The drilling was a bit of a hassle - there are no straight surfaces on this thing, so lining up holes was a challenge. The boards sit off the knobs and switches with some orange juice container plastic that I cut up for the purpose. And of course after I got everything together, I found that the very middle lug on the stomp switch wasn't quite soldered properly, so had to pull everything out again. :-/

This one took quite a while to get finished - it's probably been sitting on the shelf in various states of undress for a few months. But it's finally finished, and working. I had to go with shielded wires leading into the Theremin Fuzz, as it really misbehaves if it doesn't get a nice clean signal. The shielded wires seemed to help the tracking a lot.

 

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Demo time. Not sure when this would ever get used in a real song, but damn, it sounds cool.