Mandorla
User’s Manual
INTRO
You are now the lucky owner of a Mandorla pedal from Dusky Electronics. That’s awesome!
We’re happy to have our original design and unique sound on your pedal board.
The Mandorla is a boost pedal, so it makes your signal louder, obviously. It also adds a fair
amount of even-order harmonic distortion to your signal. Unlike clipping distortion, even-order
harmonic distortion isn’t audible as distortion, per se, but does sweeten the signal and make it
sound better—a lot like a clean tube amp. You can also turn the pedal up enough that it pushes
your amplifier into overdrive, producing a more audible distortion. Depending on how you have it
set up, the boost can emphasise treble frequencies or it can boost the full frequency range of
your instrument.
The Mandorla takes as inspiration a vintage treble boost circuit from the 1960s, updates the
sound, and dramatically increases its versatility. The Mandorla sounds great on guitar, bass,
and keyboards—and probably also some other things we haven’t tried.
CONTROLS
MORE
The
More
knob controls the output volume. Clockwise is louder. You
might
hear a little bit of
scratching when you turn this knob. Don’t worry, the vintage treble boosters do this, too. (The
volume pot is also the load resistor on the transistor, so there's some DC across the pot which
causes it to be a little scratchy when you turn it.) All the way down is roughly unity gain (output
volume is same as input volume)—so you can use the Mandorla just to sculpt the low end
response and enhance the sound a bit. At higher settings, of course, you can pummel a tube
amp into some nice singing overdrive.
MEAT
The
Meat
knob controls the amount of bass content in your signal. Clockwise is more bass. All
the way down voices the Mandorla a lot like a classic ‘60s treble booster, although it still sounds
pretty different because of its MOSFET transistor instead of a germanium bipolar junction
Summary of Contents for Mandorla
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