Casper Electronics

The casperelectronics team.

It’s been a busy 2 weeks. We’ve been working hard to finish a small run of 10Echo Benders. This is a casper designed, tweaked out studio/stage echo with some added zazz. We’ve also been working on a few one off pieces like the Speak&Spell/Read pictured above. These pieces will all be available for purchase within the week.

I am currently working to wrap up a variety of instruments which I will be posting for sale on the site next week. If you would like to receive advance notice of what is for sale before it is posted on the site, write me an email with “mailing list” as the subject. I will make the instruments available to the list one day before I post them on the site.
Send emails to:
pete@casperelectronics.com

A sample of the S&S LFO in action can be heard at the bottom of the Speak&Spell Bending page. It’s actually a Speak&Math in the sample. I start the S&M with the LFO on and then activate the “HOLD” mod which stays on through the whole sample.

Here are schematics for adding a pitch modulating LFO to your Speak&Spell.
I also added some simple mods that work well with the LFO. One is a “HOLD” effect which grabs the sound that is playing when it is activated and loops it. The other is a “TONE” effect which generates a straight tone.
This is a pretty rough design and I’m sure it could be cleaned up and improved, but it’s simple and it does work pretty well.

Here it is. Audio sample at the bottom of the page.

too much to write about right now. Lots of new pieces. working on schematics, sound samples and general documentation.

Played a show at the Piksel Festival in Norway. See the performance here:
http://www.piksel.no/piksel07/streams.htm
scroll to the right until you find “TheBunker, Piksel.no Casperelectronics”
The drum beats are made using the sequencer and drum box (the brown and white one) shown in the picture above. The gray box above is a dual voltage controlled filter that I built at Piksel.

I experimented with a BOSS DS-1 pedal yesterday and found some really fantastic mods.
My friend brought the pedal over and showed me some mods he had found that were cool sounding feedback loops. Basically this is where the audio signal from somewhere along the signal path is fed back into an amplifier stage somewhere EARLIER in the path. This creates a feedback tone and can result in some really nice sounding, rich tones when an incoming signal fights with the feedback tone. The problem is that when there is NO incoming audio signal, there is just steady, squealing feedback.
I wanted to find a way to make the effect happen only when there was sound feeding into the pedal, so that when you aren’t playing into it, there’s no sound output.
I had a suspicion that a transistor used as a gate was the answer. I experimented with some transistors configured different ways and found the 2N3904 NPN to be the most useful. I encourage people to experiment with different types though.The best effect we found is drawn below. If you have this pedal, you really have to try this!

It’s a really great sounding effect. Sort of ringmod meets harmonic exciter of some sort. The “distortion” knob controls the effect.
I soldered the transistor to the component side of the board so that I could still close the back cover. The back cover presses right against the solder side of the board so there’s no room to add components.

I’ve been working on a step sequencer design for a while based on the 4017 decade counter. I’ve finally gotten around to building a working prototype!
I posted the schematics here a few months ago.
You can also find them on the step sequencer page which I just uploaded.

I also uploaded an awesome sound recording of the sequencer in action. The recording was made using the sequencer to trigger three different synths.
–A casio SK1 was used to make the melodic sounds.
–and I had that running through an echo circuit I’ve been working on for a while
–the bass drum beat was made with a Korg MS20.
–The other rhythmic tones were made with a Paia modular synth
The casio has been modified to allow an external trigger to activate the recorded melody play back feature. So I can record a melody into the SK1 and play it back one note at a time every time i send a pulse to the new “playback” jack.

Here’s the step sequencer page.
The recording is at the bottom of the page.

my newest project. More to come.