Hello, and thank you for supporting Magpie Pedals and getting yourself one of my limited Primitive drone synthesizers.
The pedal runs on a single 9V battery (unclear for how long, hehe) or 9VDC power (2.1mm jack: center-negative).
Controls:
Primitive has 6 seperate banks of 6 oscillators. Each bank with a dedicated control circuit and volume knob (color coded). Plus optional individual outputs that all sum up to “red” (the leftmost output).
Each control circuit is simply powering a 40106 which then provides all the oscillators. An analog LFO is run into a LF398 chip that is being clocked by a microcontroller which lets us control the 40106 in three different modes:
- 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, erm, 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 a “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.
Inside Trimpot: On the inside you will find dedicated LFO “shape” trimpots for controlling each circuit. Since the LFOs are analog this simply sets how fast a large capacitor charges/discharges. Feel free to tweak these a tiny bit if you find that I didn’t manage to set them all to a nice round LFO. (I colored inside so you can easily spot which is which!)
Enjoy!