Crazynator
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!
Crazynator User Guide
The pedal uses 9VDC power (2.1mm jack: center-negative).
Info:
The Crazynator was originally created all the way back in my early days as a circuit bender. I simply took a voice-changer toy, added some circuit bends and replaced the microphone and speaker with tele jacks before putting it in a pedal enclosure. The result was a beastly effect pedal with a lot of quirks!
The new and improved Crazynator is based on the same principle. But instead of just taking the circuit board out of a voice-changer toy and sticking it in a pedal, I have designed a circuit around it that you attatch the voice-changer PCB on top of. I have tried to include everything needed to cover for as many different voice-changer specs as possible. With jumpers for different variables. And also tried to treat the signal both before and after the voice-changer effect to get the most out of its crazy tones.
This also means that you can replace the voice-changer PCB inside with relative ease, since it’s just held in place with two hex nuts and all the wires are connected with screw terminals. The switches are wired with a molex connector soldered straight to the PCB. These you will have to solder if you ever decide to replace the voice-changer PCB with your own.
Triple Bypass:
This pedal uses a unique bypass switching system that I call “Triple Bypass”, where you have three different “modes” for turning the pedal on and off:
- Short Press: Works like any regular pedal. Press to turn it on and then press to turn it off.
- Momentary/Hold: If you press and hold for about 1-2 seconds the pedal will enter a hold mode. Here it will simply stay in the state it entered when pressing down the button, for however long you decide to hold down the button, and then return when you release the button. So if you press down when the pedal is turned OFF it will stay ON for as long as you hold the button pressed down, and vice versa.
- Tap Tempo Bypass: If you quickly double tap the bypass button (either when on or off) the pedal will enter the Tap Tempo Bypass mode. Here the pedal automatically turns itself on/off in whichever tempo you tap. So to change tempo you simply tap a new tempo.
N.B. Crazynator continuously counts the time since your last tap. So if you have been in a tempo for some time and give the footswitch another single tap, it will set your new tempo based on the time between the pervious tap and the new tap - upto a maxium length of around 1min.
To exit Tap Tempo Bypass you simply press and hold the button for about 2 seconds. Note that when exiting this mode the pedal will be ON (regardless of if the pedal is in an OFF or ON state).
Controls:
The controls are very straight forward:
Two knobs: One for DRY volume (left) and one for the WET voice-changer volume (right).
Four switches: Turning on/off whatever pitch/robot effect the voice-changer has. Ranging from octave up/down to strange intervals and a crazy phaser-ish effect. Sometimes possible to combine, sometimes not.