Brian Marshall, Author at Guitar Effects - Subdecay

Evolution of the (Super) Spring Theory reverb.

Brian Marshall — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 23:20:40 +0000

Brandon with the Super Spring Theory set to spring reverb mode.

Check out the product page for more details.

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Exploring the depths of the Starlight Flanger v2

Brian Marshall — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 22:43:35 +0000

The Starlight v2 does more than your typical flanger. In our first demo for the Starlight v2 we covered a lot of sonic territory, but there was little in the way of explanation. Hell, we didn’t even show the pedal settings throughout the shoot or even say anything about it. That led to a a few questions that are just easier to answer with a deeper exploration of the controls and setup.

Most of the demo was recorded with a Music Man Axis guitar and a 69 Fender Twin Reverb. There’s some Stratocaster in there. This pedal loves dirty sounds so the Variac Overdrive was used liberally.

For most of the shoot the flanger is set up after the overdrive, but we do switch it up for a bit at 2:28. There’s a different sound there for sure. Running your flanger before overdrive gives the effect a little more girth. It’s also slightly less forgiving and can get throbby or washed out.

The first half of the demo uses the triangle LFO shape and explores the other controls, especially the depth and regen.

3:03 Sine wave LFO… Vibrato flanger!
Most flangers use a triagle LFO for modulation. Turn it down really slow and you’ve got the well known jet plane sweep tone all day long. The sine LFO really excels with faster modulation bringing out vibrato tones that most other flangers just can’t quite do. Like most Subdecay pedals we let you color outside the lines. Typically as the speed ramps up you’ll need to manually turn down the depth. With full depth and fast modulation it will get crazy. Some people like crazy, so we opted not to add artificial limitations. At slow speeds the sine LFO will spend more of it’s time in the depths and peeks. It’s a subtle difference, but with a distinctly different feel.

4:27 Square / Triangle LFO:
This LFO setting mixes two different shapes together. Slow Triangle and fast Square. It brings a “shaking” quality to the flanger that can either be jarring or mesmerizing.

6:14 Random Sample/Hold:
Similar idea to the old Sample/hold voltage controlled filter, but with a flanger. There’s a chaotic underwater and alien characteristic that. It adds a bunch of sub-aquatic depth to simple chords. Something perfect for highlighting passages in a song.

6:34 8 & 16 Step:
The step shapes are similar to Random Sample/Hold, but without the Randomness. They “step” through triangle and the repeat making it feel like the acoustics and space are shifting around you.

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When circuits are at war – YOU WIN!

Brian Marshall — Mon, 11 May 2015 17:09:50 +0000

It’s compressed. It doesn’t clean up with the volume knob. Not steeped in any 1960’s tradition whatsoever. Let’s face it, there are already a hundred other companies offering that fuzz. None have the HARMONIC ANTAGONIZER.

These notes will never bloom. They are destroyed. Fragile harmonics are annihilated. Dynamics are obliterated. Some will be offended, but loud crazy guitar sounds were never meant to be ordinary or boring.

The Harmonic Antagonizer is now available. Check out the product page for more details.

Check out a short preview on our Soundcloud.

Circuit fight – the never ending battle between fuzz and oscillator.

The Harmonic Antagonizer consists of a fuzz and oscillator circuit embroiled in a never ending war which neither can ever win. You and your guitar play the roll of puppet master pulling the strings on both sides.

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Andy from PGS features the new Subdecay Starlight Flanger V2

Brian Marshall — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 18:03:49 +0000

Andy starts off this Starlight Flanger demo with one of my favorite songs by my favorite band. Check it out!

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Turn your guitar in to a ring modulation synthesizer.

Brian Marshall — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 16:15:35 +0000

More info here on the Vitruvian Modulator.

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Spring Theory: the beginning.

Brian Marshall — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:19:12 +0000

Since 2010 or so I’d been wanting expand our horizons. We had never made clones or pedals that were really supposed to emulate any kind of vintage gear. We had always tried to focus on being original first. Maybe to a fault at times. It is a challenge to market something without an easy frame of reference to something familiar.

We toyed with the idea of building “amp in a box” pedals, some kind of improved univibe, wah pedals, etc. But every idea had two problems. 1) There were already other companies doing those things and doing them well. 2) Every idea started out simple, but we would perpetually try to add too much to it. In the end, none of it felt inspired or inspiring.

Finally I realized the one indispensable vintage sound I’d been going back to over and over was 68 Fender Twin Reverb I had bought in 2008. I loved the reverb, but while it had all the glory of vintage spring tank reverb, it had all the negatives that come along with vintage gear. It was old, it was heavy, it was a little finicky and sometimes quite noisy.

I didn’t have any idea how we could pull that off in a stomp box. It’s really hard to even gauge exactly what happens in a spring tank. It doesn’t fit in to your typical dimensional reverb algorithms well. Spring reverb is actually poor choice for creating realistic sonic space.

Most digital spring simulations I’d heard… just plain sucked. We had bought a DSP development kit a while back, but had done very little with it. We knew any spring simulation would have to be DSP based, but where would we start.

When I brought it up with Tom, he initially said he could do it in a month. After some initial development I felt like we were still really missing something. We still hadn’t fully established what was going on in a spring reverb tank and what really makes it sound like it does.

So I ended up taking apart the spring tanks in three different amps, dampening each spring and recording each one individually. Using guitars, pops, sinewaves, pulses, etc to trigger the reverb. Then we slowed down the recordings. There’s really some interesting sounds when you do that, and when we heard the spring slowed down in time you can really hear every little nuance and evaluate what is really going on.

Even after all that we still had a lot of work to do. Over a five month span Tom wrote about 50 different iterations of the algorithm, each with some minor improvements over the last until not just the sound was right, but the feel too.

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A little about us…

Brian Marshall — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:14:25 +0000

In 2009 we set out to take the old and make anew. That was my vision anyway. I wanted to take some of those old stand by effects we are all familiar with and expand. I left NAMM that year seeing the stompbox world growing in sophistication and becoming much more competitive. Sure the original Prometheus which was kind of a big deal at the time, but already we were thinking of ways to improve it. It took a while to really turn any of this in to a tangible product.

We had one big problem. We needed to develop raw talent in to something more focused. There was a learning curve, not only in programming hardware and building more complicated circuits, but also in managing something as a collaborative project without one person getting sidetracked and behind.

Initially we started working on the Quasar DLX but ran in to another problem. There were so many ideas. Some of them kept changing. I was starting to feel like we were being a bit too ambitious. Like we were driving a 1975 Datsun on a Formula 1 race track.

So we took a break from the project Quasar, and started working on what would eventually become the Proteus. it took over a year from the initial vision, but it was obvious once it was complete that we had a big hit on our hands.

It was amazing to me how much that one pedal changed not only the direction we have taken since, but our mindset in laying out functionality for more complicated products. It’s nice to say things like “no limitations” but really I think all innovation and invention is born out of limitations.

Anyway, so here we are with 2012 winding down. We are very close to completing our next pedal in the DLX series, while we are also looking forward to the next.

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