Hello, and thank you for supporting Magpie Pedals and getting yourself one of my effect pedals! Please feel free to use it with guitar, bass, synths, vocals or anything in between.
The pedal uses 9VDC power (2.1mm jack: center-negative).
Input is on the right side (black ring) and output is on the left (white ring).
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. Nasty 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).
Info:
Nasty is a kind of synth-fuzz with two square wave oscillators crashing together with your input signal. With a gate circuit you decide how locked they are to your input or if you want to play them freely as a little synthesizer. All while the oscillator chip is being controlled by a sample and hold (S&H) circuit.
It has three different modes of operation. To change between modes press and hold the left footswitch for about 2 seconds.
- Manual Mode, where you “sample” by either pressing the black button or connecting a 5V CV-Clock to the 3.5mm jack on the back (it will control all the 40106s at once).
- Auto mode, where the S&H is automatically sampling and holding. You set the rate by either tapping on the black button or adjusting the CLK knob. It will automatically switch over to whatever you change last but since the circuit is rather chaotic it has a tendancy to prioritize the knob.
- LFO Mode, whenever entering manual mode from auto mode the S&H will be in the “open” state of constantly sampling the analog signal. This makes it follow the LFO directly and you can now enjoy massive rising and falling drones in a wide range of tempos.
Controls:
The top-left “1” knob is the pitch control for the first square wave oscillator that crashes into your signal. It sets the max pitch but will always be based on where the sample and hold is set. Depending on how you set “2” it can create all kinds of strange sound effects.
The center-top “2” knob is the same as “1”, but with a significantly wider range of pitch.
The top-right “G” knob sets the input signal gate. By turning clockwise you release the two oscillators from the input signal - so they play freely. This turns Nasty into a full on little synthesizer!
The bottom-left “C” knob sets the speed for the clock when in tap tempo mode.
The bottom-right “W” knob sets the wave speed of the LFO that the sample and hold samples.
The smaller “Dry” and “Wet” knobs control the volume of the dry and effected signal.
Inside Trimpot: Inside the case, on the Nasty PCB, there are two trimpots. One sets the maxium volume the pedal can output (if you decide I put it too loud), and the other controls the LFO Shape. Since the LFO is analog you tune the waveform yourself with a “voltage divider”. The sweet-spot is between 1-3 o’clock - but too far in either direction and the LFO stops working.
Enjoy!