Embedded - 121: The Idea of Mojo

Episode Date: October 14, 2015

We spoke with Fran Blanche (@contourcorsets) of Frantone about guitar tone.  Fran has several articles and posts about space, electronics, and assorted whatnot at her design writings page. Her video blog is on YouTube. There are many different guitar pedals you can build for yourself as a way to get a better handle on analog electronics. Elecia found these at Mammoth Electronics. The song that was the first to have flanging was "The Big Hurt" by Toni Fisher in 1959.

Welcome to Embedded FM. I'm Elysia White, here with Christopher White. We're going to be speaking with Fran Blanche on music and business. Hello, Fran. Thanks for being on the show today. Hey, how are you doing? Doing okay. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Oh, well, I've got a YouTube channel and I do science-related vlogs and music-related vlogs and projects and whatnot.

And I have a company, Frantone Electronics, where I've been making effects pedals for 21 years or so. And I'm also known in the fashion world as a designer and an avid sewer. So I keep myself very busy on many fronts. Fair enough. I wanted to ask about the Frantone guitar and effects pedals. Sure. When I talk to my guitar playing brother-in-law, he is pretty rabid about what a guitar pedal should do. And there are all these terms and i have no idea what they mean uh things like warmth and brightness and fuzz and i see these same pages on your website

what what do they mean that's uh that's sort of a subjective answer um they can mean many things. Sometimes the nomenclature that we use for effects designs, they're sometimes just entertaining or arbitrary, like my fluff knob on the cream puff, for example. But sometimes they're descriptive about a certain function that you're going to control. It's sort of a mixed bag. There's no real right answer for what the description of the control means, but it will vary between what the effects designer is trying to do, either being direct and technical or being maybe kind of whimsical or obtuse uh you know in an

entertaining way um it really depends um there's a no like firm answer because the effects pedals are they're sort of a very a very broad um kind of product there's so many different manufacturers and some effects are technical and direct and some are sort of entertaining and sort of so the descriptions on the controls might not necessarily mean anything,

if that makes sense. Well, they are call-outs to things that musicians are used to hearing. Some, yes. Things like warmth or they have a at least a broad understanding when people usually who do music depending on the pedal it could be they can be descriptive uh for tone or certain settings uh on an overdrive or a vibrato anything um my pedals i tend to try to with few exceptions um label the control to say exactly what it is tone control

sustain compressor you know whatever the whatever the control is controlling um but like you say um sometimes with some makers there are some expectations that a certain kind of pedal should have a certain kind of control on it and so perhaps it would be labeled to some sort of expectation i imagine so arbitrary that was the part i got it really is arbitrary isn't it well not exactly no no and i remember uh matthew having pretty good discussions about what each thing was but i always wanted to put it back into terms I sort of understood like what kind of distortion are you adding to the signal? I mean are you adding it? Are you

multiplying it by some other function? What does this look like on a scope? Maybe we should pick one particular effect to talk about in that terms. The compressor is going to look a lot different from a distortion pedal.

Yeah, true. There's generally as a product, FX pedals, this is just my personal philosophy. The FX pedals, at least the ones that I offer, are engineered to be as simple as possible to operate i saw i used to have a strict three knob policy which actually ended up breaking but my in a nutshell it was that any effect should should not exceed three individual controls that that it should be simplified to the point where anyone can set the pedal to any combination of settings and it'll sound good that was my basic design philosophy so

in in that kind of in engineering that kind of simplification for the user you're you're taking out the technical stuff so that things like what exactly is the waveform, what exactly is this control doing? These are things that you're not introducing to the customer because they don't want to know. They just want it to sound good and they want to know that anywhere you set the combination of knobs that it's going to have a good sound. But as far as what is actually happening in the pedal that depends entirely on the design the effects are you know sort of divided into basic categories

there are categories of effects there are distortion effects which usually involve some sort of clipping or rectifying where you're just, you're crunching, you're breaking the signal up, clipping it in some fashion. There are some genre of that is overdrives, which are basically, which can have distortion in them. But the basic idea of an overdrive is it's a loud, sort of a preamplifier that's used to overdrive or distort an amplifier by just pumping a heavier signal into it so that the amplifier actually does the clipping. That's an overdrive or distort an amplifier by just pumping a heavier signal into it so that the amplifier actually does the clipping.

That's an overdrive. But that's one type of effect. Another is time domain effects, which are your choruses, flangers, echoes, delays. These are all based on time domain effects where you're taking a copy of the signal either in an analog way or in a digital way and you're just uh um playing with the time between the original single signal and um and another signal and like the reproduction of the signal

so by adjusting the amount of delay that you're talking about, it will either be a chorus or a flanger or a delay. So those are time domain effects. And then there are also phasers. What's a flanger? A flanger? Well, flangers are effects that emulate the old original engineering trick of flanging, um comes from the 1950s and um the uh when when they started doing um les paul okay les paul invented he's given the credit for inventing overdubbing which is where you take um a recording you record something on a tape, and then you play back that tape and then play something live again

and take both of those things and put it onto another tape and you combine the two. You've overdubbed the two tracks. And so when engineers started to do these sort of tape things where they record something on tape and then they want to add something to it, at some point an engineer recorded two tracks on two machines and played them and synchronized them together and we're playing them back in sync and then they must have gotten a little out of sync and as the tapes sort of got out of synchronization the strange effect happened and with the stretching

of this weird sound is wishing sound and they found that they could make this happen by synchronizing two recorders and then taking one of the recorders and putting their hand on the flange of the reel and slowing it down slightly and controlling this sort of weird spacey effect. And it became known as flanging. And flanger effects do the same thing in a solid state way without the tape.

So this sounds like it's constructive and destructive interference, both depending on how much you do it. So it's two identical signals shifted a little bit, and that would either increase the signal if it's constructive and on the same wavelength for this particular part of the sound or destructive? Right. Well, what makes flanging flanging is that there's a dynamic gradual change in the phase shift. So, you have two signals that are in phase and in sync. And as you slowly delay one of them and and slowly change the um the the the delay they they they slowly come out of phase and as they do that that sort of slow dynamic way of changing the phase

creates this kind of spacey effect sound so so yes it is um and and and what kind of makes flanging work is that it goes out of phase and then back into phase and then past. It's kind of going behind and then past and then forward and creates this watery, wishy, spacey sound that is flanging. Yeah, I can think of a couple examples of where it's been used on drums. And there's a Yes song and then I'm thinking of maybe that phil collins in here in here tonight song yeah the original uh the first example that i know of in a recording uh is the is a song called the big hurt uh and uh i wish i could remember who sang that song but it was the first one that i i know of where it was used although i'm sure that flanging was you know it was probably accidentally discovered even earlier than that but um but yeah

i some at some point um when when bucket brigade chips started coming out in the early 70s um all these time domain effects um where people have been doing studio tricks with tapes um doing like chorus flanging things things like that, that used to be done with just using two tapes that were sort of slightly out of phase. And also analog delays just started to explode when Bucket Brigade chips became available. Bucket Brigade is a term or was it a brand?

It's a type. It's a type, okay a okay yeah it's um um bucket brigade chips they're they're analog they're used for analog delay but essentially they're very they're they're these long chains uh shorter ones have hundreds of stages like ones for chorus would have you know maybe maybe hundreds of stages ones for like echo and um and reverb uh would have thousands of stages but essentially it's it's it's um a way of holding you know you have all these little stages that are holding a voltage that are resettable so it's a bucket brigade meaning that like um a voltage a voltage level is set at one stage, and then a clock moves the memory forward in a Bucker Brigade type way. So the voltage level gets handed off to the next stage,

and then the next stage, and the next stage. And this goes at a pace that's determined by a clock down the line, and it creates a delay. It's the simple way of explaining it. It's kind of like an analog shift register. Exactly. But what you're doing is rather than storing a bit, just an on and off bit, you've got a voltage level in there.

It's usually very small. It's a low voltage level, but because it has this analog range that you can put in an analog audio signal and put it through the delay line. And it chops up the signal, puts it through the delay line, and then you have to filter it and sort of smooth it chops up the signal puts it through the delay line and then you have to filter it and sort of smooth it out a little bit on the other end and so um but they were revolutionary for their time and um if you if you had enough bucker brigade chips and enough um going with a fast enough clock uh you could get some decent um fidelity but to get the really high fidelity like like for Studio Gear,

you had to have lots of even the longest Buck Brigade chips because you had to run the timing very fast. But FX pedals, like the Memory Man and such, they tended to have just a small number of chips, and so the clocks didn't run quite that fast. And so the fidelity is, well, it's medium fidelity. It's perfectly fine for live performance. Perfectly fine for live, yeah.

You get some distortion in there and some overdrive, and no one can tell the difference. Okay, so we did the time domain effects effects we did the distortion effects what other effects well there are compressors uh which um compress the dynamic range of an audio signal yes much like much like what they use in radio i'm familiar with compressor microphones nope well not that we use them. Condenser microphone. Oh, man.

I always get that wrong. Okay. Compressors reduce the dynamic range. Yes. Condensers increase the dynamic range. No, it's just a type of microphone. I'm totally clinking. Just throw a condenser out of your mind. It's not important.

Okay. Sorry. That's all right now yeah a compressor um it takes a a live signal like if you take a microphone you plug it into uh an amplifier you have the you know the microphone is going to try to reproduce the dynamic range of your voice from the quietest to the loudest. You know, you've got this peaking, spiking, you know, very widely swinging audio signal. And what a compressor does is it takes that very widely dynamic signal and it begins to limit it.

So it brings up the noise floor and it begins to squash down the headroom without distorting the signal to decrease the dynamic range. So the actual amount of swing, the variation in the actual strength of the signal becomes more limited. And that makes the whole thing sound louder overall. I mean, it isn't really, but it makes it sound louder. Right. It increases the perceived loudness quite a lot and it also removes the percussiveness so you don't have the loud hits the loud you know peaks um so it homogenizes the sound but at the same time the perception of loudness increases which is why it's being used in radio um since she's like the 30s or 40s well and it got really bad in the 80s and that's why it gives me a headache but that's

that's all whininess um unless you want to talk about rush in which case we can talk about rush what didn't they over compress one of their cds such that they had to re-release it recently because yes yes they did was that a was that a rush I know that the um Metallica yes that was even worse yeah yes Metallica is the record for the most compressed CD well um CDs um today CDs I think have more compression than like they ever used on radio um it's compression on CDs as to the point of ridiculousness now. It's gotten better. The loudness war has started to ebb a bit as better engineers started paying attention. It's funny because, you know, when people come over to my shop,

especially younger people who have grown up listening to CDs and MP3s and i play them a 1950s hi-fi record on my hi-fi vinyl through a all-tube hi-fi and and they hear the immense dynamic range that they're really taken aback because they never heard anything that lifelike coming out of a cd and i have to explain to them well it's called dynamic range you know and they and they'll, is it supposed to get that quiet? Why is it so quiet now? It's like, well, that's, yeah, it's really quiet. Yeah, it's funny if you go back and listen to CDs from the early days of CDs, the 80s, they have much wider dynamic range than anything from the 90s

or the early 2000s. To a fault. Actually, using Rush as an example, I think one of the first CDs I bought was a Rush CD. And if you look at it on the meter, I mean, they have like, I guess, what, 16 bits, right? Yeah. So, like, peak level on the CD is like 8 bits. Like, they're only using like half of the total dynamic range for their peaks. And we all know what 8-bit music sounds like. Well, exactly.

Well, it's not the same. The problem is that the early CDs, they were thinking that they would keep it really quiet, but the problem is the majority of the music is down in the 4, 5, 6-bit level, where you lose all the fidelity, which the low sampling rate is bad enough, and then you take into that the fact that you're only using the bottom bits, and then you really don't have much left. And then they switch just using the top bits.

Exactly. It's from one stream to the other. I know that there's a like a white stripes uh cd i have where if i play it and i have you know i have analog meters uh on my um preamp and uh play it through the cd player and the and the meters go to zero db and they don't move right like like the the music you hear that you're hearing drums hearing guitar you're in vocal but hearing vocal, but the needles just staying stationary. It's just 100% compression. No dynamic range at all. It's amazing that you can actually get sound waves coming out from that kind of compression. They've definitely gone as far as they can go with audio compression

these days. I really do think they're coming back. Some of the newer CDs we've gotten are better. I know of a couple of producers and engineers who are working very hard to And I know they discuss it more. But it depends on the genre. And the indie world.

Stuff that ends up on the radio, typically they try to compress because they want to be the loudest thing. And then the FM radio of course recompresses everything to match levels so it's yeah this is why you refuse to listen to the radio isn't it i don't listen to music on the radio yeah well yeah we all know i'll listen to anything it sounds terrible well i i you know i i spent a lot of years on radio and i i do have a i do have a fetish for fm compression and especially like i like, I do like to listen to certain kinds of music compressed, particularly 60s music, because that's the way I always heard it, you know, on the AM radio. And so, for certain kinds of music, I do like the AM radio sound and the 70s FM radio sound for certain kinds of music, because that's how I, you know, emotionally, that's how I remember hearing it.

But, you know, there's also on the, in the other extreme for the new sort of war on fidelity is the Neil Young product. You know, he's got this new company or is part owner of a new company that have come out with this new digital recorder it's a very high band digital recorder to bring back um you know vinyl level fidelity in a digital arena so so there there are there are some new um new lights on the frontier of fidelity in that respect so um that leads me to a question about pedals. Back to pedals. All right. Unless you wanted to ask it.

No. Okay. So talking to my brother, the brother-in-law that was mentioned. His brother and my brother-in-law. It's amazing how this works. Hi, everybody. Did we mention we're moving and we're a little tired? Okay. amazing how this works hi everybody um did we mention we're moving and we're a little tired okay uh he he has a lot of uh a lot of effects pedals and he's bought a lot of effect pedals in the past he has a lot of amps guitars he has a lot of everything and so every time i remember

an amp it's one that he's he's sold like oh how is that marshall you got you were so excited about it oh he hasn't played marshs in decades. I know. I can't keep up. We're off track. Okay, sorry. But what he says is a lot of the sound from these pedals comes from almost particular components, like... The JRC4558D. Yeah, JRC4558D. Yeah, JRC 4558D.

Is that an op-amp? 4558 is an op-amp, yes. So I guess my question is, I don't really, I have no knowledge of the electronics of these things. How does, what is it about a particular part? Why can't you just go to DigiKey and type in op-amp? Yeah, and this may be a little bit of devil's advocate asking the question, because I sort of understand, but...

Why pick one part over another? Right, yeah. It's a different thing than when you're building a digital circuit, right? It depends. I mean, it depends on what your goals are. I use a variety of different kinds of op amps, transistors, different components, depending on the specific design and depending on what it needs to do. Op amps, there are several things that you would, several different things you'd look for in choosing one. One is the voltage range, supply voltage.

So certain op amps work better at low voltages like if you're working off a nine volt battery um some uh work better uh at um higher supplies like 18 20 volts or so um you know dual supply like plus or minus nine plus or minus 10 volts um so there's a voltage range to consider there's also um signal to noise ratio uh 45 58 is a kind of a very basic op amp it's it's it's not really the quietest thing in the world you know 741 is another one it's kind of ubiquitous but it's not really that quiet there are um there's also the um the uh um the output range whether what percentage of the supply voltage can you get as maximum output you know without

clipping and so some op amps um are designed to be what they call rail to rail which means that they they will the output of the op amp will go you know to the supply voltage and down to ground uh nearly uh you know so that whatever the supply voltage is you could get an output signal of that uh same peak range you know most op amps there is a limitation some limitation of the output what kind of maximum output you can get based on the supply voltage and there's uh you know um uh you know there's also you know some are cmos some are to have j are jfet uh you know they're fet based um rather than having transistors in there there's lots of different choices um and different. And also current.

Current can be an issue depending on what you're driving. So all those things you're taking into consideration and the components that you're choosing in an op amp and what it's supposed to do. Do some of those things affect sound in ways that nobody else would care about, otherwise designing a circuit? Basically, the only thing that the user would really about otherwise designing a circuit well basically the only thing

that the user would really notice is noise okay you know the noise um uh but um everything else is really based on just the the kind of engineering that you're trying to um the kind of role that you're trying to get the op amp to um to play as far as uh the kind of like i said the the kind of dynamic range that you need out of it the the kind of current output you need the kind of signal to noise ratio you need and the kind of supply voltage that you're going to have are usually the main considerations and of course there's also cost because the um different op amps come in different can usually there's several choices you know that they'll give you the and and the choices usually end up in some sort of a letter does it or combination of letter

designations at the end of the op amp that designate uh like um tolerance uh like either manufacturing tolerance or um or uh or temperature range or other things that would make an op-amp that's identical to another op-amp like much more expensive or much cheaper just because there are certain qualities of that op-amp that have been changed or tightened depending on the type. Matthew said something about slew rate being important with that particular op-amp, the JRC4558D. 4558. Well, I don't have the data sheet in front of me, so I wouldn't be able to answer any

specific questions. No, I just, you mentioned a lot of other characteristics, and I wondered if slew uh was an important thing i i shouldn't make fun of my brother-in-law he might listen to this but occasionally he tells me things about electronics and then i go off and think about them and think no no no no no no but is this one of those things it's true your father listens to this sometimes too. I'm going to have the worst Christmas. Yeah, if you look at a data sheet for any op-amp, you're going to find quite a lot of data about its performance and every conceivable type of application.

So depending on what you're looking for, you would scrounge for those particular features for a particular component. So, slew rate might be a consideration in a particular kind of design. So, sure. Why the old op-amps? Why aren't there new op-amps that meet all of these criteria why do people get so attached to the sound of a particular app amp that was only made in the 70s or whatnot oh i don't know if i don't know if people are necessarily fond of a particular op amp sound but

they they don't they've stopped manufacturing and developing analog chips quite some time ago. It's just there are no, I'm not aware of any new classes of analog amplifiers being developed or that have sort of, it's not a frontier. In fact, most analog chips have ceased production, like the Bucket Brig brigade chips that i talked about most signal generators a lot of the original analog chips are have all ceased to be manufactured or or are now being manufactured in only in a cloned format, maybe a substandard format. But the ones that you talk about, the 4558, like I said, the 751,

these are very, very old types. So they're just ubiquitous. They're just standards, really. So they're just much easier to obtain. And there's something to be said if you're doing manufacturing to to use components that are readily available or still available as opposed to using components that are antiquated or no longer manufactured so i think there's some there's some um some folks who get a distortion pedal or something and then they you know a newer model and they will try to replace the circuit with something from you know more more vintage more vintage circuit

to try to replicate that sound and maybe not without any particular knowledge of why that works just it used to have this op amp so i'm going to swap this out um so there's some of that happening i think too yeah well this i yeah i people like to do stuff like that i i'm not sure that that really makes a difference tonally i mean because the the the op amp isn't really going to be giving you tone. That's all in the support stuff, the capacitors that you're using to buffer your stages, filtering, other things affect tone. The performance of an op-amp, if it's just amplifying a signal,

is pretty straightforward. You're not really getting tone out of it necessarily i mean the only thing that like i said swapping out op amps is really um the only thing that's beneficial is if you're um choosing a lower noise version over one that's noisy for for a high gain stage but other than that there's really little or no benefit i think to back winding an op amp uh but there i have this discussion a lot with people who um who want to argue the idea of mojo and i that's the this gets this is where it gets to the subjective nature of music and sound you know um where it becomes less scientific and more about if you believe that it sounds different than you hear that it is sounding different does that make sense yes totally

totally this is where we talk about gold uh cables and my brother's gonna kill me but i have an example of this um did you send him the same song twice? Yes. Years ago when I was mixing one of our records, I had gotten a little bit irritated with the number of slight changes in track levels and things. So I claimed I had made one and showed it to him. He said, oh, that's much better.

And, of course, I had done nothing. He was very mad once I revealed to him that I had done nothing. Well, and Fran said she liked the way FM and AM sounded for some types of music. And so some things are very subjective but real. And it's like smell. Like, I don't like the smell of bananas. That has to do with a childhood trip in Mexico and a banana that was left too long.

It was horrible. So I don't like the smell of bananas in a way that's very visceral. But if you listen to music on FM, you start liking the way FM compression is. And so music is like smell in that it's not something you process intellectually it's something you i think talking about talking about music quantitatively is probably not going

to lead anywhere that makes anybody happy that's true except if you're a digital designer right right but like the arguments over tube amplifiers versus solid state versus vinyl versus CD, everybody is associated with... I can make those arguments all day. Oh, sure, sure. But there's also a lot of nostalgia attached to that stuff. Yes, but there are, I mean, it's pretty broad, but I mean, there are very clear sonic distinctions between like a high-f high fidelity tube amplifier and even a high fidelity solid state

amplifier, just in the way that they reproduce sound. Oh yeah. No, I'm not saying that they don't. Different dynamics involved. And also like, even like between CD and vinyl,

I mean, there's just no contest about where, about fidelity. It's just, there's just so much more information on, on, on even the worst vinyl record as composed, as opposed to even the best CD.

Whichever you like is more likely to be whatever you like. You grew up with. Or whatever you grew up with. It's less likely to be what is the highest fidelity to life. I still have fond memories of cassette tapes, which I think everyone can agree were terrible. Yeah, well. I had that one that was sort of melted yeah let's say you know a track pretty awesome i still i still have a tracks that i listen to you know those are nice wide tapes that yeah moving much faster tape speed

much wider tape path uh you know um it's just more tape moving faster equals more fidelity that's just the reality so but yeah and microcassette well forget it but i can see how people get very passionate about what they believe in music whether it's and it's complicated though because there is truth and belief and it's all mixed together yes there i and right and wrong don't i mean guitar amplifiers is one area where yes they have solid state modeling amplifiers that are supposed to sound like tube amplifiers but they just don't and so you get people like why are you using this old thing from the 50s with you know tubes from russia well this is why and then you hear somebody play through it well a tube amp it's it's all about the transformers so that's that's what you don't

get in a solid state amp is you know solids i mean the the fundamental difference is that solid state amps are direct coupled you know transistors directly drive the speakers and with the tube amp you've got a big iron transformer in there. And that big iron transformer, that gives you all the tone. It's really where it's all at, is a transformer. Could you define tone? Harmonics. Come on, the time I asked Matthew for that, it was awesome. Defining tone is like describing smell

that's fair that was not the answer matthew gave it took an hour it was hilarious i wish i'd recorded that oh okay i should stop looking at matthew's email so uh let's see we what okay so this does come all back to why can't we do it in software i mean i understand that some digital electronics and that not everything is perfect no the problem is that it's too perfect oh is that the problem that's my that's my understanding well it's it's not that it can't that things can't be done virtually or emulated it's just a matter of uh why why emulate the world when the world is so great is is my argument the the art of analog electronics is dealing with the real world of physics. It's not about having a repeatable algorithm or emulating the world or a virtual tone. It's about the real world.

It's like my telephone. I've got an old Bell telephone with carbon receiver that I like to use. And I hate my cell phone. Just because there's something visceral and real about a phone that has weight to it, that has a sound to it, that has, you know, real analog qualities to it that has a sound to it that has you know uh real analog qualities to it um and so i i think that for younger people it's definitely a generational thing i think there's younger people who grew up with the idea that everything is can be emulated that everything can be virtual um are quite happy with that. And I think that the distinction between why analog audio as opposed to digital processing, you're going to find the lines are pretty divided about personal philosophy

and really what, and the personal experience of music. For me, music is a living, breathing thing. It's human beings, it's human beings it's instruments it's the human voice it's human hands uh creating live music and recording music in an analog format processing it in an analog way playing through analog effects through um you know through an amplifier there's there's no substitute for that in some ways so some things like delays and things like that arguably it's better to do it in a really good digital way than to try to do it with the older bucker brigade technology for the reasons i previously um expressed but but other things uh you know it's uh

you can tell you know the difference between something that's got a visceral living quality to it and something that's emulated and it might be might be like you said that it's too, that a virtual effect might be too perfect or too perfectly repeatable. Not really wild enough, maybe. Yeah, one of the things, I do a lot of recording, and one of the things I try to do is, like you're saying, emulate the analog sound because I can't go out and buy a bunch of vintage gear. It would cost me tens of thousands of dollars to get some of the things that, you know, for a couple hundred dollars I can get a plug-in and attempt to capture some of that in a recording.

It's very hard these days to record in an analog way. It's very easy to get a very quality studio built out of digital components. So the tension of trying to get a more live analog sound out of all of that stuff has actually created an entire industry. But those plugins are only as good as your model of a piece of analog hardware. And as you were saying, Alicia, why don't you just have a transfer function, but you have to find it. I said that before we started, actually.

You have to find the transfer function from the input to the output. And there might be, well, it might be hot this day, and that changed the transfer function. It might be this capacitor over here is just about failing and sounds really cool. So it's very hard to emulate all of that. You can get close. And in a multi-track recording, maybe you've got that in a bunch of places and it's good enough.

But I think it's still hard. So I know I brought up transfer functions before we started recording. But since you brought them up on the show. You're going to ask me to define it? I am. Oh, wow. It's been a long time since that class. So a transfer function is usually used in systems engineering,

is the class name in case you wondered. And it's a way of modeling the outputs of a system based on the inputs of the system. And usually you take it into the Fourier space and then you can start talking about how the transfer function behaves with signals. So you say, this input frequency, has this happened to it on the output? Well, for example, the tremolo pedal effect

is you take your input signal of the guitar note, the tones of the guitar, and then you add it to a sine wave. And that gives you the wah-wah-ish addition to your sound. Right. And if you did that in the frequency domain, the addition actually is not that interesting. But if you multiplied it, then it would be really cool.

But I guess then you would end up with something more echoey. Yeah, so I guess what I'm saying is you can do that, and you can try to take an old piece of electronics and figure out that transfer function. Oh, and it's easy to do sine waves, but it's really hard to build a room. And it's really hard to build something that's not quite right. Or not quite repeatable.

For example, if you had a capacitor that was on the edge, you would be playing for a little while, and then it would get hot, and it would do something different. And then you would not play, and so the first half of your song would be different from the second half, or it would depend on what key you were in or what the refrain was. And so your components, your transfer function changes with time, which is not a very nice thing to do to your mathematic software modeling system.

Anyway, back to Frank. Right, back to Frank. I think we agree with you. I agree with you anyway. Yeah, we, well, and we call that modulation. If you're modulating a signal, like the tremolo, or modulating one signal onto another signal. But human, one of the things about the human experience of sound is that they have found that, you know, human hearing is, you know, in the animal kingdom, pretty bad. I mean, our hearing by cat standards is pathetic.

Mine used to be a lot better. But what really makes the experience of hearing for human beings is that our brains have a superior ability to process sound. And so, the way we experience real life and this is where it comes down to fidelity what what is fidelity experience of fidelity in the in the human mind is all about time because in our in our stereoscopic world uh our ability to discern time between our two ears is phenomenally fast so um uh it comes down to when you're trying to and let's let's say that you like you say to to to emulate a room the sound of a room if you're in a empty room and you clap your hands and you hear that sound or you record that sound, but clap your hands again, clap your hands a hundred times.

Every time that you clap your hands, that sound that's recorded is different. It's never the same twice because you're never applying the same amount of force. Your hands aren't meeting in exactly the same way. You're moving around. Maybe you move your hands a little bit to the left to the right you're breathing the air is moving in the room there are there's this immensely complex system which boils down to every single atom in the room and the atoms in that make up the room itself the temperature all of these things the butterfly effect you've got oh you got massively dynamic systems that are determining the specific sound of that room for that sound that you're creating

at any one time and so you know what is the point of modeling a system that complex when you can just actually record clapping in a room. And that's sort of my, that would be my argument about analog versus digital. Yeah. Sometimes the only reason is you don't have a room. Yeah. Well, that's just sad not to have a room. It is true. Well, I'm never going to sing in a cathedral, but I can pretend.

Well, it just so happens. I mean, one of the things that I'm going to vlog about is my plate reverb, which is the ultimate analog way of emulating cathedral. So hopefully I'll be able to do a demonstration of that. Wait a minute, wait a minute. You just said you should go to the room. Now you're emulating it oh but she's emulating with analog yes i'm analog i'm it cancels out it's emulating

stuff i'm emulating it in a in a uh with a device that has its own extremely complex uh system you know it's its own a complex environment uh in a in a real plate reverb so in a sense it is sort of it's a room in a box that is cool although my software is really complicated too yeah but it's deterministic that yes the deterministic is is part of the problem and now that i've looked up tremulous i realized that it is modulated which means it's multiplied which means the fourier domain is interesting and yet we're still going to go on. Okay. Because adding a sine wave would just add a... Offset. Well, a squeak.

Oh. It would just be a... Oh, a tone. A tone, yeah. Okay, sorry. I have to look up the effects pedals as we talk. I'm so clueless about this. It's pretty hilarious.

My brother-in-law plays rockabilly. What? He does? He used to. He plays rock. What does he play? We haven't been to see his new band. We're horrible people. They play rock and roll.

Rock and roll, rockabilly. It's all good. What pedal should I be looking at to give him for christmas if this is the amount of information i have well if he's playing rock and billy you don't want to buy him a pedal you want to buy him a really good amp he's got those no he's amps are expensive so to give the history better um our band he and i used to be in a band, and we played originals that were very 60s tinged. Oh, you played Wipeout, and there were a couple of songs that didn't sound like Wipeout, but definitely were in the same family.

Surf and blues and things of that nature. So he had a few pedals he played through, but I don't remember what they are. I should have had him send a picture of his pedal board. Anyway. Well, one of the things he said about his pedal board was that most of the pedals change the sound even when they're nominally off or not engaged. Does that sound right, Fred? Depends. I think that's called true bypass or something like that.

Oh, the bypass mode. Well, some pedals are true bypass, meaning that you've got a switch, a mechanical switch, which is turning the loop of the effect in and out of your signal chain. So the true bypass, when the effect in and out of your signal chain and when it's when the so the true bypass when when the effect is off the uh the effect is completely taken out of the audio chain it's just there's a hard switch some pedals uh are on all the time and you're basically just playing through you're always playing through the electronics but it's just electronically switching the effect part in and out of the

audio chain but you're always going through transistors or op amps or something there's all that's always on you know those are two different kinds of and even if you have like a knob that controls a potentiometer that signals the amount of that effect even if it's already all the way to zero there's still effect it you know in a um in a in like an active switched effect uh you're only when you hit the pedal the pedal button to switch it on and off you're only switching in and out the effect itself but you you're still playing through some electronics in the pedal with active switching. So you're going to get the noise and other things

that might be non-desirable. Well, it affects the signal, because the main issue is the dynamic range. It's not the same as having the signal just go right through. There's, you know, it's very dynamic. So as soon as you start putting it through a transistor that's got, or even a series of transistors, you're almost inevitably dropping the dynamic range a little bit just because you're going through um some circuitry that some people can hear as as you know a slight loss in fidelity

some people can't uh and also depends on if you're really looking for a really really clean signal or um or if you're you know if it's really dirty, you probably can't tell. Right. But that's usually the reason for true bypasses. And the other reason is pedal boards because there are some players that they're not playing one pedal or two. They've got 20 or 50 effects. And if some of them or all of them are actively switched, well... It's just going to be bad.

Yeah. It's all so too bad. Yeah. So, that's the other argument for true bypass uh is if you've if you've got lots of pedals you know the the um the signal will get very get muddied very quickly if you're going through 15 amplifiers on the way to your amp even if those amplifiers aren't like even if they're very good even if they're very good and very clean and but you just you you get a you get loss uh and um whenever you just keep adding stages

that makes sense i feel that way about software if someone wanted to build their own pedal a do-it-yourself sort of thing um maybe for their brother-in-law what advice would you have for them learn to solder okay most most of the our audience if they don't know how to solder they are it's on their list to learn so yeah okay so solder check um well there's there's a lot you can learn online i mean there's lots of projects lots of tutorials for basic stuff so you know uh it's like any other any other electronics project you've got the same challenges with construction and you know you're going to put it in a case you know and you're talking about a high gain uh type of thing uh with that subject to hum and radio noise and stuff so with

a pedal you're gonna take more time and consideration for your case and your grounding and trying to you know keep noise out and such and um uh but it's uh it's it's the same challenges as you know any kind of electronics if you're building your own pedal so well it's i do a fair amount of digital stuff or putting together different dev kits from Adafruit or Sparkfun or any of the evil mad scientists. And so soldering, yeah, I do a fair amount of soldering, but the analog stuff I just look at and go, where's my data sheet for the digital, for the ADC? I don't even, yeah, op amps. I know what they are. I could design them, but I don't even, yeah, op amps. I know what they are. I could design them, but I don't really know how to use them. Do I need to learn how to use op amps in order to be able to make my own guitar pedal?

Not to make it, but I mean, I guess the difference would be if you're going to make a pedal based on an existing design or if you're going to design a pedal based on a existing design or if you're going to design a pedal as like a new concept now if you're going to design it from the ground up thing you would have to understand some basics about op amps just to be able to control to control them control their gain deal with noise have the right kind of of feedback, have the right offset voltage and such. But if you're just working off of a schematic, if you have a design that you're just going to build, you don't necessarily have to understand

the specific components to be able to build it. Right. And I think if you were to design or invent one from scratch, I think knowledge of how op-amps work and then knowledge of basic RLC filtering? You can certainly do well with some basic knowledge about all analog electronics, just op amps, transistors, feedback, biasing, RC filters, you know. So, yes. Sounds like building a guitar pedal would be a good way to learn about some of these analog electronic concepts. Oh, yeah, sure. guitar pedal would be a good way to learn about some of these analog electronic content oh yeah sure um in fact um i think uh you know especially for for young people you know young people are starting out and they're playing guitar um you know a pedal might be the first thing they want to tinker together you know so um so yeah that's uh and there's certainly the reward factor, because whenever you do a project, you want to have the reward of completing a project that does something for you, even if that has the the motivation of that if you're successful

if you build this pedal but you're going to play it you know and then you can you know show it off and and it serves a rewarding purpose so it's a good motivator for a project i think it's part of your own musical identity too it's not like, it's something you use as a tool. It's, you know, making your own tools is differently satisfying than making something that you play with. And if you build it, you can fix it. Right, that's true, too. Well, conceivably.

Yeah, troubleshooting is a whole other art that uh that people should learn you know troubleshooting but you know in when you do a project there's always troubleshooting involved so i think i think learning troubleshooting goes uh hand in hand with building so after after we finish the show i'll ask you for some links for do-it-yourself guitar pedals and maybe we'll find some good suggestions in case people want to build one or two. But I should have warned you about that question ahead of time. You sell guitar pedals, though, in case people don't want to build their own, and that's FriendTone, friendtone.com.

Correct. How long have you been doing it? 21 years. But you took a break in the middle. I took a break. Well, I took a couple of breaks, a few breaks, actually. I took a break in the 90s when after I came out with the peach fuzz. It was like a year after I came out with the peach fuzz i really got burned out

um building pedals it was you know i had i had a two product business and i just got tired of building and um i took up a job working for my competition and uh moved to new york and worked for electro harmonics for a couple years. Then I went back to doing Frantone full-time in 2001, and then ended up stopping production again in 2009. So I've been on hiatus for six years and bringing it back not because i'm not uh rather than doing the manufacturing myself which i don't want to do anymore i've licensed out the manufacturing to another company and they're actually doing the manufacturing i'm just doing the designing so it's much more um uh much less stressful yeah for for me not to have to deal with the manufacturing cool when do you think they're

going to start shipping well soon i hope um it's uh it's been in the works for quite some time so anytime really anytime now well I do wish you much luck getting it actually shipped Christopher any additional questions? Probably thousands we could talk about this for hours

yes but we are still we have to pack up this stuff today these microphones don't jump into a box on their own we didn't get the good ones the good microphones the ones that jump into boxes on their own that would be cool friend do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with yeah um it's uh when uh when you're having an asthma attack, it's always problematic to do a podcast. Thank you. The coughing and the, but yeah, well, I guess part of that analog tone discussion is that nothing gives you tone like asthma. That sounds like an advertisement for something.

Sounds like a new name for a pedal. Asthma, the effects pedal for your chest. My guest has been Fran Blanche of Frantone. Check out her YouTube channel and her pedal page on frantone.com. Of course, there'll be a link in the show notes. Thank you very much for joining us, Fran. I hope your breathing gets a little easier. Thanks for having me.

Like the weather, this shall pass. And thank you, Christopher, for producing and co-hosting. And thank you to Matthew for not ever listening to the show. For the rest of you, thank you for listening. And thank you for our new iTunes reviews. We really do appreciate those. If you'd like to say hello or send us feedback in case there's something you didn't like, hit the contact link on Embedded FM or email show at embedded.fm. As we alluded to, Christopher and I are moving houses that shouldn't impact the podcast too much, but it does mean we'll be a little distracted in the next week or two. If I don't get back to your email, feel free

to send it again. Sorry. My final thought for this week should be something profound about houses, but instead I found something by Buckminster Fuller because he's so cool. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.