HoneyDripper: LFO//Bass Friendly

[Mousstache_Bash]

I just bought a HoneyDripper board, and was wondering if anyone was aware of any mods that could make it more bass friendly?  I don't know necessarily that it isn't bass friendly (haven't played one or built one yet), but I was curious if anyone has done any experimenting.

Also, I was wondering if there is a way that I could add a LFO to the sweep of the effect.  From what I've heard of demos the dipthonizer doesn't seem to have much of a sweep, but I'd still be interested in trying to do some slow swells or something.

[stecykmi]

haven't built this yet but i suspect the bass response is limited since the input cap is rather small (.01uF). i believe this effect is specifically voiced for the mid range that a guitar produces, so it may require a significant number of tweaks. one way to side-step this problem might be to use an effects loop mixer pedal such as the runoffgroove splitter-blend. this will allow you to mix in dry signal to preserve the low end.

if you're willing to experiment, increase the input cap, C1, and try playing with C5-C8. increasing them should probably set the filter closer to the bass guitar frequency range. without making any promises, i would probably increase them by at least 100% (ie 10n and 3n). socketing them would probably be a good idea.

adding an LFO input could also be tricky... the envelope generation circuitry is fairly complex, but my best guess would be to try applying a LFO voltage at either R19/pin 9 of IC1C or at R21/C13. use a resistor in series, using the value of R19 or R21 respectively.

good luck, let us know if you experiment with anything.

[midwayfair]

Adding an LFO for the Honeydripper would be extremely difficult, and probably won't do anything worthwhile as a mod.

In general, an LFO can control any variable resistance element. But the Honeydripper is two parallel stages. This means your LFO would need to control more than one parameter. Check out Madbean's Warhead (univibe) for some inspiration on how to control multiple variable resistances with a single element, in this case, one lamp surrounded by four LDRs.

The Honeydripper, however, is an envelope-controlled filter effect. Just modulating the filter effect won't do a whole lot ... your guitar still needs to trigger it, and anything that modulates the filtering is not going to magically get more signal back. This means that to switch into LFO mode, you would need it to bypass the envelope section entirely but leave the filter sections intact. I really don't see any way to do that, but it's an extremely complicated circuit. There's almost certainly going to be no way to do it short of using a handful of DPDT switches, which is hardly practical.

I do have some ideas, though.

1) You'd have an easier time adding an envelope filter in series with an LFO-based tremolo design. The volume peaks would trigger the envelope, creating a stabbing wah sound. Then you can just switch off the tremolo to have the envelope filter work as normal. You might need to figure out what controls the decay and attack ... I'm not really sure how the effect would react to being fed signal really quickly.

2) If you just want an LFO-based wah sound, check out the "Crying Time" project I just posted in the Members Projects section. It's based on Deadastronaut's Light wah. It's a very small circuit and sounds very cool in series with an envelope filter and also on its own. You might be able to squeeze it in the same box with a Honeydripper. You could just put it first in the chain and use a DPDT to bypass it. This is probably less circuitry overall than you would need to just mod the Honeydripper, come to think of it.

3) Bean's got the FSH-1 project coming up. It's possible that this is already the sound you want in Sample and Hold mode.

4) Lastly, your first post says that you're looking to do "some slow swells." Do you just mean that you want something that sounds like gradually moving the wah forward on each note, or do you specifically want to be able to hold a note for a long time and have the wah do its thing? Because if you just want it to swell more gradually, there may be a way to control the attack. That's probably an easier mod.