Magpie Legacy Pedals & Devices: a legacy worth sharing (is the end goal)
In an effort to share as much as possible of the everythings we make together, this is the place where we put stuff like images, firmwares and user guides for all the discontinued Magpie Devices devices. So if you forgot how something works or just bought, traded or won something we no longer make, then then you're in the place where we can hopefully make it make a little bit more fun to play with.
Dry is basically a strange variant of Wet. Replacing the spring tank with a transducer that is pressed against a piezo element (contact microphone) through a spring. So essentially its a spring reverb with no reverb at all. More like a fuzz or crazy sounding box of industry sounds. Probably the only pedal ever invented where you tighten wingnuts to affect the sound!
The Expression Multiplier is very literal. It takes one or two expression inputs an multiplies it so you can control more than one thing at a time. You can go all the way up to eight outputs from a single expression pedal, which can get really wild!I invented it primarily to control as much as possible with a single ExpSeq for myself. Like circuit bent toys and such. But it turns out to be quite the powertool on a pedalboard as well.
Dispersion is one of those effects that is sort of a culmination of a bunch of ideas. It takes the input pitch and turns it into a square wave (just like in Bit Pirate). Then using this as a control signal similar to whats going on in Weird. Finally taking this control and applying it to the silencer from Patterns as well as the crazy stuff I made with Bonkers (at the same time!). Making basically an input (pitch) controlled stutter effect with ring mod pitch shifter delay stuff going on. And the fuzz circuit from Stutterphone just to top it all off.
Just as Nasty is a mix of Fruits and Cozy, the Electric Egg is a mix of Fruits and Foam. Taking the same circuit but replacing the LFO in the S&H with a FSR (force sensitive resistor). Essentially getting a two voice pressure synthesizer that you can force an audio signal into.
Nasty is basically the main sound of Fruits with the controls from Cozy. An updated “crash sync” synth circuit (now possible to be used as a very raw and dirty two voice synthesizer if you so desire) that is controlled by a S&H/LFO/BUTTON that you can tap tempo or sync to external gear. It sounds really nasty when the oscillators are changing pitch while trying to lock to your input signal, but without your input signal it sounds Primitive enough to become a perfect drone synth.
Expseq is a eight step sequencer expression pedal that can control two pedals at once. Because after having turned any pedal into a Weird pedal I wanted to turn any other pedal into a Bubbles pedal. Its also perfect for controlling circuit bent toys and synthesizers (which is something I’ve long wanted to sequence!).
Yeah is something I created because I wanted to turn any guitar pedal with an expression input into a Weird pedal. It takes your input signal and creates an expression signal from it, so that when you play your instrument it expresses one or two pedals at the same time. Sort of an envelope follower expression pedal.
Wet was created by experimenting with the Feedback Organ circuit. I simply replaced the speaker inside the feedback organ with a reverb tank when my friend Sourcery Studios was visiting. We both marveled at the sound and started switching out capacitors to get a bunch of different tones from it (thats why it has a rotary switch that just goes between different capacitors).
In the Wet V.2 edition I gave Wet a dry signal path, so you can blend. I also introduce a feedback loop so you can make the springs tank sing all by itself!
The Crazynator was another one of my very early magpie concepts, where I circuit bent a toy voice changer and replaced the mic and speaker with an input and output jack. So one day I just decided that it could be a fun project to take all that I have learned so far and finish what I had started! So I made my own circuit that sort of envelopes the voice changer. Trying to get as much as possible out of it. So there is still is a toy inside, but now with a whole bunch of more magpie!
Pebble was originally a project I developed to have a pedal easy enough for my intern at the time to put together. So originally it was released as The Intern. The effect is a single knob variant of Bit Pirate with a blend between between distortion and octave down square wave.
Later when developing the Triple Bypass idea with Analog Weapon I revisited this circuit because I wanted to see how tiny I could make a pedal. And thats how I made Pebble.
Bonkers is the result of a very strange idea I had one day while developing Patterns. Since I was already working with the Bubbles sequencer I wanted to see what happened if I took the pulses that gets created in Patterns and just run them straight into the PT2399 inside of Bubbles (full circle and all that).
It turns out it does something very bonkers! It makes the delay time go back and fourth between max and min and depending on the speed of the pulses you can get some really bizarre ring mod pitch shifty sounds. Very avant garde.
Patterns is basically combining the Stutterphone silencer with the sequencer setup from Bubbles. Making for a really simple yet effective musical tool. I call it a sequenced silence but its essentially a square wave tremolo where you can go between different tempos. What’s really interesting is that you can sync the sequencer to other equipment and create polyrhythm silence patterns. In the V.2 edition I was also able to find a way to dial back the stutter effect so that you now have a depth knob.
Flicker is another continuation of the experiments with PT2399 (all originating from the Bubbles circuit). So just like in Cozy, Weird and Möist, there is a LDR going parallel to the time knob. This time however I took a flickering LED (that is made for those electronic candles) and created a sort of random delay, based on the flickers.
Lust is arguably my first try at being conventional! I decided that taking the PT2399 delay circuit I had been experimenting with and get rid of the experimental parts could be quite the challenge in itself. Originally taking two of the PT2399 and figuring out how to do a series/parallel circuit, but later splitting the signal in more than one place and adding three more PT2399 in the form of a reverb.
Weird is weirdly related to Disco Distortion. After I had made a circuit that lights up an LED when you play I figured I should see what happens if I take the delay experiments I had done with an LDR (see Möist) and attatch the light-up-when-you-play-a-sound circuit to it. The result is really weird. A sort of envelope follower time machine. Which becomes a really weird pitch shifter also?
Since the delay can jump drastically to be very long (as long as you are playing) and then immediately jump back (when you stop playing) to being short, the magic is kind of stuck in the time it takes to jump.
The Stutterphone is one of the first ideas I ever conceptualized as Simon The Magpie. I made the first versions long before I had plans to make my own pedal company. Originally I just took the input signal and wired it through the mechanics of a vintage rotary telephone. So that when you spin the dial it disconnects the signal and you get a stutter effect. So when I started up “Magpie Pedals” I naturally wanted to create an official design based on this concept.
The main difference is actually that I changed which type of vintage rotary telephone I use. Sourcing one that has a BIG RED BUTTON instead which if wired correctly can also disconnect your signal. Perfect for manual stuttering!
I also incorporated a fuzz circuit to spice it up a bit and in the V.2 edition I turned to Analog Weapon to add memory to the stuttering so that you can loop your own patterns.
Disco Distortion was basically just a lucky accident. I was playing around with a distortion circuit and decided to try swapping the clipping diodes for some “automatic” RGB LEDs. Turns out that if you make your signal hot enough these are gonna start doing their little light show at the same time as they will add all kinds of awful noises back to your audio signal. Let’s call it an RGB harmonic distortion effect.
Bit Pirate is once again a derivative of the original Fruits circuit.Taking the first part with the LM386 but replacing the 4017 with a 4040 and a 4070 to generate 3 octaves of a square waved signal.
Including the distorted LM386 signal, you now have 4 individual volume knobs to blend together your very own ultra thick synth tone.
Foam is directly based on the way I ended up implemented the LFO in Möist. It uses an LDR (light dependant resistor) in parallel with the Time knob as the way to get an extra delay time depth control. So when I had the first prototype of Möist in front of me I started experimenting with switching out the LDR for other components.
I landed on using an FSR (force sensitive resistor) since it naturally is really fun to control delay time by pressing down on something. So coming up with a fun design to make this both interesting and foot safe for the user was the real challenge. The original Foam also has a second FSR that controls something it probably should not. But in V.2 I pulled it back and designed it around a larger FSR to have more of a pressure area for the user.
Möist is not a real word. Its just Moist but spelled with a swedish Ö. It was created right next to Bubbles. Me and Horseman had already hooked up a sequencer to a PT2399 inside a pedal. So I just moved that wire coming from the pedal to the LFO signal inside of Fruits instead. It turned out fantastic! A modulated delay with a range I had never heard before. Ramping up to push the delay time of the PT2399 to its absolute limits before returning back again can create all sorts of wonderful weird sounds
Bubbles was my first original idea for a pedal. I remember pitching it to Horseman when we had started developing Fruits and both of us found the idea really interesting. Since I had a handful of PT2399 based delay pedals laying around at the Magpie Place all we had to do was setup a classic 4017 sequencer on a breadboard and connect it straight to the PT2399 inside one of the pedals. It worked great, and so Bubbles was born!
Since then Bubbles has gone through a couple of updates (developed together with Analog Weapon and DDC) to continue expanding on the original concept. With the latest Bubbles V.3 having two PT2399 (individually sequenced) together with a bunch of modes introducing both LFO and Portamento. It even has MIDI!
Happy Little Accident is very literally just that. An accidental circuit that emerged on the Fruits breadboard. We took a session before taking the Fruits prototype apart and just started swapping out components and hoping for something wild. In the end we basically just ended up with something that sounded really awful in a fun way and called it a day. Later I also added a hole to the design so that a user could stick their finger in it and basically circuit bend it on the fly. Fun.
Fruits was the first official magpie pedals pedal. Developed together with my friend Horseman who taught me all the initial basics of circuit design. Coming straight from circuit bending I had know idea how to read a schematic or work on a breadboard, so it was a really intense period of understanding the software for designing a PCB and coming up with strategies for designing something from scratch. I still to this day work alot with the techniques I developed at this time.
Fruits also layed the groundwork for lots of my later designs utilizing the 40106. This circuit uses a LM386 to amplify your signal and run it straight into the 40106 (in a sort of “crash sync circuit” configuration) to create a synthyfied version of your input signal. This is then run through a 4017 to create two additional voices with set intervals stepped down from the original input pitch. So kind of like a square wave harmonizer.
A “Round Robin” is a “system where items are processed sequentially in a rotating order”. We decided to turn that into a synthesizer.
The idea was originally pitched with the use of a specific casio keyboard (still secret which unit, but feel free to guess) all the way back in 2023. I showed Analog and DDC in a voice chat and tried to describe how I was thinking it should work. They liked the idea and we planned how to do it all using an 8bit microcontroller to keep it really simple. But basically just a few weeks after we had started working on it we realized that we wanted to do so much more than just limit ourselves to the “Round Robin” concept. So we pivoted to a more powerful microcontroller and started coming up with as many fun and interesting ideas as possible for a small table top synthesizer where we could have complete control over how things are played.
The Round Robin itself is made out of a 3D printed skeleton covered in PCB faceplates (this is of course so that I could put it together myself in the magpie workshop) and we are providing you the 3D files here to download. So if you ever decide to pick apart your unit and try to replace either the buttons or the skeleton with some other color, then feel free to give it a go!
Primitive is essentially a Beehive V.2. Loaded with lots more of the 40106 experiments I came up with when developing the Nasty pedal. The idea being to change the pitch of 6 oscillators at once by simply changing the power on the IC with a sample and hold (S&H) circuit. Which is really wild sounding considering you can tune the 6 oscillators individually. Then just making 6 banks of this for a total of 36 oscillators going wild at the same time! Of course including the controls I developed with Analog Weapon (originally for the Cozy pedal) to make it possible to switch between LFO, S&H, or play by a button press.
The Feedback Organ is a direct result of some of my wild experiments with no-input techniques and talk boxes that I have performed over on youtube.
The general idea is simply to try and tame the sounds of pointing a microphone at a speaker. I decided that I good way to do this would be through PVC tubes that you can cut to varying lenghts to get different “notes”. And then make a sort of keyboard to turn microphones with individual volume controls on and off.
I also decided to implement electronic feedback loops in the circuit, together with a classic PT2399 delay (that can also feedback) and has its own external input that then runs to the same speaker where you “plug in” your PVC tubes. You see the point - feedback!
Smootch was originally a ukulele. In a video where I put a ukulele neck on a large aluminium enclosure and put a piezo element (contact microphone) inside and ran it through a guitar pedal kit.
This video experiment resultet in the song “Rainbow” on my “Kind of a one” album with both the epic sound coming in at the 54 second mark (thats the ukulele), but also the falsetto vocals in the intro is me singing into this ukulele. And I just liked this so much that I dediced to turn it into a microphone! That looks like a mouth.
So I redesigned my own distortion circuit to fit a more comfortable microphone footprint and to amplify the piezo signal even more. Resulting in the resonance being picked up through the metal enclosure a lot more, so that it can pick up sounds from further away than “usually” possible with a piezo element.
Disco Noise is a fun little noise synth that I created during the development of the Disco Distortion pedal. Creating a boost circuit to amplify the awful sounds coming from the “automatic” RGB LEDs when they do their little light show, and then running this signal through a 4040 to get lower octaves of these sounds. So with three copies of this circuit in the same box you can now harmonize with LED noise!
The Pocket Drone is like a baby version of the Beehive drone synthesizer. Using 2 of the 40106-ICs instead of 6. Still giving you a total of 12 oscillators with individual output and volume for each 40106 (so 6 per output). So in a way smaller footprint than Behive but still a very powerful drone synthesizer.
The Lofi-Phone is the result of not wasting the rest of the old telephones I source to make the Stutterphone pedal. I designed a small boost circuit for the hearing element of the phone to use it as a microphone. Since the phones original design is sort of perfect to have as a standing microphone. A very lofi sounding microphone. Very nice.
Beehive was my first drone synthesizer. I had been working so much with the 40106 circuit at the time that I felt like making something with as many oscillators as possible in a satisfying footprint. So 42 oscillators spread out with a volume knob and dedicated output for every 6 that you can make with a 40106. To create the proper sound of a Beehive!