Poison Apple: "Snow Bunting Autowah"

rwl

Well-known member
Build Rating
5.00 star(s)
This is a report on my build of the Poison Apple Auto-Wah, based on the Mad Professor Snow White. I wanted to build some pedals that weren't just overdrives and fuzzes, so I picked this up.

snowbunting_front.jpg

Inspiration
I liked the snow white name of the original pedal and wanted to play on that - and buntings are fun birds, so I went with the Snow Bunting as the bird for this one. These are really pretty birds of the arctic north.

Buntings were a name for a family of birds, but as many birds have recently been reclassified based on genetics are a name for a birds, the buntings have been distributed across a few families. There are "proper" buntings or "Old World" buntings. But there's also some buntings that are in the cardinal family, and buntings in a related family of longspurs. Effectively, all these birds look like large sparrows, but they're all pretty cool. The cardinal-related buntings like the Painted Bunting are quite garish. The snow bunting is most closely related to longspurs.

I do have a different autowah pedal being printed soon, which I think has a more appropriate bird, but you'll have to wait.

This was one of my earlier pedals without a background, and I'm happy with how it came out - the blue colors are really nice and the snowflake looks great. It's a little boring and I'd probably adjust the font if I were printing it again, but overall I think it's pretty crisp. I waited to post this because I thought it was a good "Christmas" pedal for the season :).

The Build
It was a clean build, no problems. It's a surprisingly straightforward pedal, with no unusual parts to source. I would have expected an LED and LDR or something at least, but nope. Assembly was straightforward, and the enclosure was printed correctly the first try.

The Pedal
I find only some of the settings to be usable. This thing really quacks with the delay turned low, which adds autowah on every note. That's a lot of fun.

But many of the settings make the tone awfully bright; I wish this was more 'neutral' sounding and passed through the overdrive pedal's tone more. It'll also cause higher notes to get clipped in a bad-sounding way. You really have to go in more with a more muted tone or with treble turned low or it gets a bit icepicky. Given those limitations, I found it to be pretty good with a baritone, esp on the low strings, and I bet this would do really well with a bass.

Maybe I'm not using it right? All in all, I could see this staying on the board to add some flavor to backing tracks, but it's a little too fiddly for regular use.

Firsts
  • 😭 First autowah
Ratings
  • Build: 5/5 🌟
  • Pedal: 3.5/5 🌟
 

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This is a report on my build of the Poison Apple Auto-Wah, based on the Mad Professor Snow White. I wanted to build some pedals that weren't just overdrives and fuzzes, so I picked this up.

View attachment 108122

Inspiration
I liked the snow white name of the original pedal and wanted to play on that - and buntings are fun birds, so I went with the Snow Bunting as the bird for this one. These are really pretty birds of the arctic north.

Buntings were a name for a family of birds, but as many birds have recently been reclassified based on genetics are a name for a birds, the buntings have been distributed across a few families. There are "proper" buntings or "Old World" buntings. But there's also some buntings that are in the cardinal family, and buntings in a related family of longspurs. Effectively, all these birds look like large sparrows, but they're all pretty cool. The cardinal-related buntings like the Painted Bunting are quite garish. The snow bunting is most closely related to longspurs.

I do have a different autowah pedal being printed soon, which I think has a more appropriate bird, but you'll have to wait.

This was one of my earlier pedals without a background, and I'm happy with how it came out - the blue colors are really nice and the snowflake looks great. It's a little boring and I'd probably adjust the font if I were printing it again, but overall I think it's pretty crisp. I waited to post this because I thought it was a good "Christmas" pedal for the season :).

The Build
It was a clean build, no problems. It's a surprisingly straightforward pedal, with no unusual parts to source. I would have expected an LED and LDR or something at least, but nope. Assembly was straightforward, and the enclosure was printed correctly the first try.

The Pedal
I find only some of the settings to be usable. This thing really quacks with the delay turned low, which adds autowah on every note. That's a lot of fun.

But many of the settings make the tone awfully bright; I wish this was more 'neutral' sounding and passed through the overdrive pedal's tone more. It'll also cause higher notes to get clipped in a bad-sounding way. You really have to go in more with a more muted tone or with treble turned low or it gets a bit icepicky. Given those limitations, I found it to be pretty good with a baritone, esp on the low strings, and I bet this would do really well with a bass.

Maybe I'm not using it right? All in all, I could see this staying on the board to add some flavor to backing tracks, but it's a little too fiddly for regular use.

Firsts
  • 😭 First autowah
Ratings
  • Build: 5/5 🌟
  • Pedal: 3.5/5 🌟
Interesting. I am almost finished a build of this as well - although I won't have a case for a couple of months. I'll be interesting to see if I feel the same about the sounds.
 
That looks stellar. I like the fonts. They're bold without taking up too much attention. Your builds never fail to impress and this is no exception. That said I was never a fan of the Snow White and although I built it up twice it just never did it. My fave is the Aion version of the Mutron. Every time I made one and showed it to somebody I had to make another one. So I've stopped showing it to anyone. It's the least "tweaky" of any of the filters I've ever built.

And the Poison Apple reference is brilliant
:)
 
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