Aleph Null
Active member
Troglodyte is a versatile reverb capable of everything from short, bright, roomy reverbs, to dark, cavernous, infinite sustain, to full-on self oscillation. I built Mad Bean's Moodring with a short brick and loved how that could go from short and bright to full-on runaway oscillation. I set out to make my own design with all the features from other reverbs that I loved, plus something that could do precise, controllable self oscillation and reverb swells.
The enclosure is a limited run from Love My Switches.
The Belton Brick is a big boy! It's soldered in place on top of the board so that it hangs over the bypass LED and leaves just enough room for the footswitches. I made sure to leave plenty of room for top mount jacks and to get a soldering iron in to the potentiometer lugs once the rest of the board was populated.
An input buffer feeds a PT2399 delay chip. This provides pre-delay of up to 300ms or so by way of the Onset control. I used pretty standard filtering on the delay input. The output stage of the delay does double duty as additional filtering as well as a gain stage to feed clipping diodes for the Saturation control. The saturated signal then hits the Belton Brick. One of the Belton 3's outputs feeds a tilt EQ centered around 1kHz and goes to the output mixer. There's enough gain on tap that you can get the wet signal well above unity with higher Saturation settings.
I wanted a "kill dry" option, but I didn't want to stop there, so I went for a Dry mix instead. This goes all the way from "kill dry" to "solo boost" with 14dB of gain available. This means I could set the unit for a boost to take a reverb drenched solo, or I could set it to cut volume for an ambient verse. I like having options!
The Sway control is the same envelope-controlled vibrato I used in my Tape Delay.
The crowning feature of this reverb, in my opinion, is the Feedback and Swell|Delay controls. The Feedback sends the second reverb ouptut back to the delay input allowing for momentary gushes of reverb, infinite sustain, or self oscillation. The feedback loop interacts with the other controls to create some surprising results. The Swell|Delay switch controls how the momentary foot switch interacts with the Feedback control. In Damp mode, the Feedback control is connected by default and is disconnected when the foot switch is pressed, dampening the feedback. In Swell mode, the Feedback control is disconnected by default and only engaged if the foot switch is pressed, allowing the reverb to swell in.
Here's a demo:
As always, I have extra PCBs; if anyone is interested, just DM me.
The enclosure is a limited run from Love My Switches.
The Belton Brick is a big boy! It's soldered in place on top of the board so that it hangs over the bypass LED and leaves just enough room for the footswitches. I made sure to leave plenty of room for top mount jacks and to get a soldering iron in to the potentiometer lugs once the rest of the board was populated.
An input buffer feeds a PT2399 delay chip. This provides pre-delay of up to 300ms or so by way of the Onset control. I used pretty standard filtering on the delay input. The output stage of the delay does double duty as additional filtering as well as a gain stage to feed clipping diodes for the Saturation control. The saturated signal then hits the Belton Brick. One of the Belton 3's outputs feeds a tilt EQ centered around 1kHz and goes to the output mixer. There's enough gain on tap that you can get the wet signal well above unity with higher Saturation settings.
I wanted a "kill dry" option, but I didn't want to stop there, so I went for a Dry mix instead. This goes all the way from "kill dry" to "solo boost" with 14dB of gain available. This means I could set the unit for a boost to take a reverb drenched solo, or I could set it to cut volume for an ambient verse. I like having options!
The Sway control is the same envelope-controlled vibrato I used in my Tape Delay.
The crowning feature of this reverb, in my opinion, is the Feedback and Swell|Delay controls. The Feedback sends the second reverb ouptut back to the delay input allowing for momentary gushes of reverb, infinite sustain, or self oscillation. The feedback loop interacts with the other controls to create some surprising results. The Swell|Delay switch controls how the momentary foot switch interacts with the Feedback control. In Damp mode, the Feedback control is connected by default and is disconnected when the foot switch is pressed, dampening the feedback. In Swell mode, the Feedback control is disconnected by default and only engaged if the foot switch is pressed, allowing the reverb to swell in.
Here's a demo:
As always, I have extra PCBs; if anyone is interested, just DM me.
