BOSS PS-3
At the heart of this piece is a BOSS PS-3 pitch shifter pedal.
I’ve added a few noisy bends and a pitch control joystick.
The joystick allows for much more expressive adjustment of the pitch than the tiny little knobs do. The pedal has a few different modes including an echo. In echo mode, the center two knobs control echo rate and decay. For this mode it may be desirable to have knob control instead of joystick so I added a switch that toggles between knob and joystick control.
I removed the circuit and all of the hardware and mounted it on an aluminum plate which a cut down to fit in a pelican case. This is a design I like quite a bit as the pelican cases are rugged as hell and look pretty swank.
It takes a little bit of work since I need to make posts which bolt to the inside of the case and to the face plate. Also the inside of the case slopes in slightly so getting an accurate measurement of the exact face plate size can be tricky.
The bends are pretty noisey and do a lot of bit crunching effects. The hardest part about working on the new boss pedals is that they use mostly surface mount components and you need to use very thin wire. If you use heavy wire it could very easily pull leads and components off the board if pulled or bent the wrong way.
When using very fine wire, you HAVE to use heat shrink tubing where it is soldered to hardware or zip tie all of your wires to minimize connection movement
I may put a schematic up eventually, but probably not. If you want to bend one of these, you should just get in there and poke around. It’s not hard at all to find interesting bends. Don’t expect to find a huge variety though. I found a few variable distortion/bit crunch effects and a loop effect.
This piece was built for gore core electronic artist Otto Von Schirach. In honor of Otto, I affectionately refer to this piece as The Spewing Gut Pile.