Disco Distortion
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.
Disco Distortion User Guide
The pedal uses 9VDC power (2.1mm jack: center-negative).
Controls:
The Disco Distortion has two separate distortions running in parallel (a left and a right side). The left side and right side have identical controls on the outside but are set up differently on the inside for slight differences in their respective tones.
The pair of distorted signals each runs through its own set of three RGB LEDs, but the oscillations of one set of LEDs is strong enough to bleed into the other set. This is especially notable when not running any signal through the effect.
The upper “V” knobs are your two volume controls. One for each distortion.
The lower “L” knobs are your RGB LED signal controls. Added to try and mediate the oscillations coming from the LED’s. All the way counterclockwise is as silent as they are gonna get. Going clockwise is introducing more and more of that signal.
When playing through Disco Distortion your signal will kind of lock on to the oscillations (since the signal is being run straight through the LEDs). So, finding a sweet-spot can make it sound sort of like the signal is feeding back.