Do you remember BOSS Slow Gear pedal? If your a guitarist you most likely do or at least you’ve heard of it. It was a great pedal sold from 1979 to 1982 and it was made in Japan. The pedal would cut the attack of your notes giving a swelling sound. It god famous for making the guitar sound kinda like a violin.
I always liked that effect and i even made a clone a few years back. It is based on a 2SK30 JFET and it was a pain getting these transistors. It was a lot of fun though and i though i should make a Project Ryu swell effect pedal and so LAGGER was born!
Recently i worked on a few projects with LM13600/LM13700, one of them is a nice noise gate / compressor unit which i will present at a later date, and i really like the VCAs that can be built with these chips.
To cut the attack of a note and then swell the volume basically we need a triggered fade in effect. This means that we need to control our VCA with a rising voltage using what i call a ramp generator.
In a previous article (Monitoring Amplifier モニターアンプ P3: Speaker Coupling Delay) i described the circuit of such a ramp generator and it even has a command input. I will use this circuit with the LM13600 VCA all controlled digitally with a PIC18f1320.
The input is fed into an ADC channel to be rectified and averaged in order to detect when a note is played. Once it is detected, the ramp generator is triggered and provides the control voltage for the first VCA.
LM13600/LM13700 is a dual amplifier the second one is configured as a VCA with manually set control voltage. In the picture below you can see how the circuit works. The top signal is the input signal, the middle signal is the output of the ramp generator and the bottom signal is the trigger.
Read more: Project Ryu Lagger – Guitar Effect