Special Porpoise Fuzz: "Starling Fuzz Tremolo"

[rwl]

Build Rating

4.00 star(s)

A slightly annoying build for a niche pedal. This is my report on the Special Porpoise Fuzz, based on the Catalinbread Antichthon. I got this pedal after looking for weird pedals and finding this video.

Inspiration

This pedal is most known for the wild animal sounds it makes when the "Gravity" knob is turned up. The pedal makes a ton of strange sounds, and so does a starling, which is a great mimic but also just naturally makes a ton of alien sounds (you can easily hear all the sounds in this video in the wild). Starlings are an invasive species that's done very well in the US, traveling in huge flocks. They feel like fairly smart birds and are similar in behavior to Mynahs.

Besides the crazy sounds, the starling is known for its speckled coat (which gives it its name) and beautiful iridescent shine. It was perhaps a little uninspired to come up with a space-inspired design but this was the last pedal in my Tayda order, which I was trying to bump to 10 prints, so I went with it. I'm happy with the unique spacey colors, but might swap out the knobs in the future.

The Build
The build itself was easy, this is not a pedal with many parts or space concerns.

However, I spent a while figuring out how to source the hard-to-find 1T308A transistor, and which germanium diode to use - this was one of my first germanium diode pedals and I stressed over which diode was "correct" when the build guide didn't specify details.

Thankfully, I found some good build reports. @xefned really helped out the most with this thorough report, that mentioned a few different transitor options, including easy-to-source silicon transistors. I ended up also going with the 2N3905, as with xefned. That arrived after I'd finished the rest of the build, so I used a 2N3906 as a standin. Both seemed to work fine, but I felt the 2N3905 was a little better - confirmation bias? Meanwhile, as with @VanWhy, I went with a D9K diode. I also tried a few other D* germanium diodes from Stompboxparts, and a 1N34A. I didn't really notice any differences between them. The best I can describe it is the D9K felt more "solid" but it was hard to hear a big difference.

The Pedal

This is a bizarre pedal. It really does three things:

1. It's a fuzz pedal. The fuzz is kinda anemic and weak compared to other fuzzes. I'll need to play around with it more, but the most useful thing is that sometimes I can make it kinda brassy - similar to the Trumpeter pedal but less robust. I don't think the fuzz deserves to be on my board.
2. It's a tremolo. There's a time control that creates a regular tremolo pulsing, but it's much more finnicky than a regular tremolo and doesn't have depth, mix, or other controls. At the extremes the tremolo kinda disappears. The most useful thing here is that at the most extreme the tremolo becomes very rapid, like the Woodpecker pedal. I like this as it can add a different sort of tone or texture to fuzz.
3. It makes weird animal noises. I would say there's 6-7 kinds of chirping noises that it makes - sometimes like birds, sometimes like dolphins, and some are more science fiction clicks. They're very organic sounding, which is surprising. This is the whole sorta rationale for the pedal's existence, as far as I can tell. The problem is that these clicks aren't really interactive with the guitar. You can adjust the tone and volume knobs on your guitar, or the gravity knob on the pedal, and the sounds will change a little. And you can adjust the Time knob on the pedal to play with the frequency of the sounds. But they don't respond to your guitar playing at all, and they are quite repetitive. I think if strumming just triggered one of the sounds this would be much more useful. But they just play on a loop. At certain settings they do interact with notes from the guitar but it just sounds bad, like choking the guitar. After ~5 minutes the animal noises got kinda old.

So, in short, it's a pedal that does 3 things not-very-well. You might consider it if you want to apply tremolo only to fuzz, or want to try the brassy kind of fuzz that the Trumpeter or Carcass can also produce, but don't want 3 different pedals.

Build rating: 4/5 : Easy build,once you figure out 1-2 hard-to-source parts.
Pedal rating: 2/5 : Not terrible, but a below-average novelty pedal

 

[Feral Feline]

Another great looking pedal, even if the circuit itself isn't quite up to snuff.



Also, new avatar based on your Riflebird Delay is quite cool.