Someone got the new pedal early, drops mid February.
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Fairfield Circuitry - THE CLUB
- Thread starter liveburning274
- Start date
2 switches are for octaves (1 and 2 down, and 1 up). It will be interesting if it could run with minimal distortion as an octaver
Pedal drops at the end of March according to FC.
Seems like it’ll be geared more to synths than anything. Fairfield hasn’t really made anything guitar/bass focused since about
Thanks! and what exactly is 'slew' in this context?
Slew is a more well-known thing in the synth world (especially in modular synth contexts), and essentially, it's a control over the rate of change in a value or signal. If you had a signal that went from 0 volts to 5 volts instantaneously, that is an example of zero slew. However, if you applied a slew to that voltage change, it will now take some time for the signal to gradually rise from 0v to 5v. They are the basis of what's called "function generators" in modular synthesis, and have a ton of applications.
In musical terms, slew applied to pitch results in what's commonly known as "portamento" or "glissando". If you were to play a low G on your bass and then slide up to D on the 10th fret, you've effectively "slewed" your note change, as you've induced a transitional time period between the two notes.
In signal processing terms, there is a ton of stuff that uses slew limiting either as a basis of the effect, or as a key component of its operation. It's super interesting what can be done with it and just how many places it pops up. This is a pretty good primer of what slew is and how you can use it:
DANGIT, now I have to make more room in my budget.
This is actually one of my favorite things about Fairfield. Even when they do the weird stuff like Roger That, they somehow always manage to strike a balance between weird and usable.
Man the more I look at this pedal the more interesting it gets! It's like a hybrid between a distortion, synth pedal, octave, and filter. They are definitely leaning into the modular synth mindset with units like this that don't have clearly defined boundaries of functionality. Seems like the slew predominantly acts as a lowpass filter on the signal, which I've done with Maths, but I've never seen a slew with feedback before. I guess they did this to add resonance control to it?
I love that they seem to have added the LPG circuit from the Shallow water to this pedal, that's so much of the magic of the SW. Seems like the 1/8" expression input is dedicated to the slew frequency so it would roughly act like a filter sweep. However the CV input looks to be reassignable with some internal switches, I wonder if there is an internal trimpot to attenuate that?
My hype levels are going wild at the moment, haha.
These are just guesses but here they are. I'm gonna nerd out a bit here so first a few definitions if maybe someone isn't familiar:
Rectification is another super common thing in analog electronics, it is the process of converting AC current (signals that have both positive and negative polarity) to DC current (current which only has one polarity). There are two broad types of rectification we commonly see in guitar and modular, half wave and full wave.
Half wave rectification converts an AC signal to DC, but ignores one polarity. So given a sine wave input, a half-wave rectifier would produce something resembling this picture, where the signals' positive polarity goes through unaltered and the negative polarity is ignored and outputted as 0v. You could do the rectification in either positive or negative polarity, the main point is that one part of the AC signal is discarded and replaced with 0v.
Full wave rectification does the same process but with a notable difference - the negative polarity portion of the AC signal is not discarded, but instead "reflected" back into the positive polarity. This alters the basic shape of the waveform, but it also produces a frequency doubling in the positive domain, which we'd perceive as an octave up.
These illustrations are taken from the Make Noise Maths Illustrated Supplement, if anyone is curious.
I love that they seem to have added the LPG circuit from the Shallow water to this pedal, that's so much of the magic of the SW. Seems like the 1/8" expression input is dedicated to the slew frequency so it would roughly act like a filter sweep. However the CV input looks to be reassignable with some internal switches, I wonder if there is an internal trimpot to attenuate that?
My hype levels are going wild at the moment, haha.
These are just guesses but here they are. I'm gonna nerd out a bit here so first a few definitions if maybe someone isn't familiar:
- Vpp === voltage peak to peak. So, a 5vpp signal means a signal has a maximum swing of +5v and -5v
- Positive and negative polarity === the portions of the signal that are above and below 0v, respectively
- When I say "signal", I am referring to an AC electrical signal that fluidly swings between positive and negative polarity. A guitar signal for instance would swing between some positive and negative peak, dependent on amplitude, etc
- A square wave is a specific type of signal that does not swing fluidly between voltages, but rather goes directly between two extremes. A 5vpp squarewave signal is only ever at +5v or -5v, never anywhere in between
- accepts an input voltage
- has a reference voltage to which the input voltage is compared
- outputs either a "high" or "low" voltage, depending upon whether the voltage at the input is above or below the reference voltage
- when the input voltage crosses into positive, you get 2v at the output
- when the input voltage crosses into negative, you get -2v at the output
- resulting total output of the comparator is a 2vpp square wave, with the same frequency as the input signal. This square wave will also have a "duty cycle" of 50%, meaning that half the time its in positive voltage, the other half negative.
Rectification is another super common thing in analog electronics, it is the process of converting AC current (signals that have both positive and negative polarity) to DC current (current which only has one polarity). There are two broad types of rectification we commonly see in guitar and modular, half wave and full wave.
Half wave rectification converts an AC signal to DC, but ignores one polarity. So given a sine wave input, a half-wave rectifier would produce something resembling this picture, where the signals' positive polarity goes through unaltered and the negative polarity is ignored and outputted as 0v. You could do the rectification in either positive or negative polarity, the main point is that one part of the AC signal is discarded and replaced with 0v.
Full wave rectification does the same process but with a notable difference - the negative polarity portion of the AC signal is not discarded, but instead "reflected" back into the positive polarity. This alters the basic shape of the waveform, but it also produces a frequency doubling in the positive domain, which we'd perceive as an octave up.
These illustrations are taken from the Make Noise Maths Illustrated Supplement, if anyone is curious.
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Explorations around a schematic found among old papers of mysterious origin, suspiciously similar to a datasheet sq/tri oscillator. All that was needed was to connect the dots. A slew limiter smoothes out how quickly incoming voltage can change, limiting it to a fixed v/sec. slope. Since time...
fairfieldcircuitry.com
Yes, I too would like to know if this can be used as an octave down.
