Fruits
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.
Fruits User Guide
The pedal uses 9VDC power (2.1mm jack: center-negative).
Info:
Fruits is a type of crash sync circuit with two additional selectable voices, giving you both harmonic and disaharmonic sub-octave intervals.
We also incorporated an LFO for some movements in the main oscillators pitch.
Feel free to use it with guitar/bass/synths/drums/voice or anything in between (results may vary).
Controls:
Footswith with circle LED - Effect Bypass.
Footswitch with the star LED - LFO on/off.
The top-left “V” knob is your volume control.
The center-top “T” knob is sort of a fine tune of the whole circut, its hard to explain exactly what it does, but it can help you a bunch. Going fully clockwise can make Fruits bleep bloop sing on it's own and going fully counter clockwise will make it starve but stay audible in the lower register of .
The top-right “Star” knob is the LFO rate control. It goes from very slow all the way to ringmod territory. On the inside of Fruits you’ll find two trimpots for tuning the depth and shape of the LFO.
The bottom-left “Watermelon” knob is the main oscillators pitch frequency control, this goes from silent (only voices), to starved, to full beautiful oscillation and all the way up to “old people can’t hear this" frequencies. All in conjunction with the knob.
The center-bottom/bottom-right “Cutlery” knobs control the two voices. Select from five options per voice in a downward three-octave range. Let’s explain it by assuming Fruits is receiving note C3. Selecting each of the following options will produce:
- 0: Off: no downwards shift
- 1: C2: 12 semitones/1-octave
- 2: F1: 19 semitones/1-octave + 5th
- 3: C1: 24 semitones/2-octaves
- 4: G#0: 28 semitones/2-octaves + minor-third
- 5: F0: 31 semitones/2-octaves + 5th