4 thoughts on “Acid Synth Effects

  1. Interesting guitar effects for monosynths and acid boxes:

    1. Envelope followers/auto-wahs. They’re generally lowpass or bandpass filters that have cutoff coupled to the input volume. They have a slightly lagging attack. They give monos like the 303 an entirely different character.

    2. Fuzz boxes, especially silicon transistor circuits. Nasal and boxy tone that will pound any signal into a narrow pulsewidth. Compared to distortions and overdrives and tubes, fuzz is very electrical sounding distortion, and you can starve the circuit for raspy gated tones.

    3. Analog bucket brigade delays. They filter off the top and bottom and can self-oscillate with a grainy character, and the clock is controlled by pot-attenuated voltage for smooth pitched time changes. Repeats are always distinctly different than the dry signal. When you don’t have a thousand dollars for a tape delay, get a nice cheap BBD.

    And don’t be afraid of guitar digital multieffects such as the Pod series, Zoom G3, etc. Lots of tricks for the $, but beware of the amp models that have very high bottom end cutoff.

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