Glitchee
FX TYPE: SubOctave-Filter
Enclosure Size: 125B
“Softie” compatibility: none
©
2020
Overview
tl,dr: The Glitchee is what you get when you combine an EQD® Bit Commander® with a Seamoon Funk Machine. It does
distortion, octave down, and sub-octave tones with the ability to dial in a dynamic filter over the whole thing.
Story: I liked the simplicity of the Bit Commander and wanted to do something with it, but not a straight up clone. It
occurred to me that adding a dynamically driven filter could produce some synth-style tones and that was the genesis of
the idea. What came after was a bit a slog. The Glitchee ended up being the most breadboarded project I’ve ever done. I
think it was four or five teardowns and re-dos.
Anyway, it took a while to find the right filter and envelope control. I ended up with a modded Seamoon Funk Machine
then used a little trick to make the LM386 double as the distortion generator and envelope detector. Like most solutions,
they become obvious after you find them. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right path to “optimal topology” (that’s
fancy speak for ‘making shit work good’). As the name implies the effect is rather glitchey. Octave generation is not too
smooth in its decay but that is part of the charm of all analog octave down. Mostly, it’s just a lot of fun to play!
Controls
• DRIVE:
Sets the volume of the distorted tones.
• LOW, SUB:
Volume of one and two octaves down, resp.
• BLEND:
After the DRIVE, LOW and SUB summing stage the audio splits into two paths, clean and
dynamic filter. The Blend control sets the mix between those.
• VOL:
Total output volume.
• SENSE:
Sets the envelope response (IOW, the sensitivity to pick attack).
• FREQ:
Sets the filter response (really, it’s a gain control for the filter). The SENSE and FREQ are used
together to set the overall shape and response of the filter.
• DECAY:
This was intended to set different decay responses in the envelope filter but I later changed my
mind. It might be more accurate to call this switch “TRIM” as it cuts off a bit of low end from the filter in the
Up position. Down position is normal response. Please see the Notes section for further explanation.
• OCT:
This secondary footswitch allows you to toggle the octaves down on and off.
Terms of Use:
You are free to use purchased
Glitchee circuit boards for both DIY and small commercial operations. You may not
offer
Glitchee
PCBs for resale or as part of a “kit” in a commercial fashion. Peer to peer re-sale is fine, though.
Technical assistance
for your build(s) is available via the
. Please go there rather than emailing me for
assistance on builds
. This is because (1) I’m not always available to respond via email in a timely and continuous manner, and (2)
posting technical problems and solutions in the forum creates a record from which other members may benefit.
