Electronics and Programming Projects

The Nastifier (2022)

It’s finally here! The Nastifier was a project started 4 years prior to make an incredibly gnarly and aggressive distortion-fuzz pedal, and it’s now finally realized in the flesh. The sound is based on a combination of hard-clipping distortion and an unusual analog octave fuzz architecture with a built-in capacitive feedback loop. It rocks!

2021:

The Phase-inator:

Brief demonstration video some sounds possible using the Phase-inator (with no additional effects)

This plugin is a small side-project I have been developing during this semester. Upon doing some research on KOAN Sound and other electronic producers, I found an unusual synthesis technique some producers is phase distortion synthesis, which creates different timbres by modulating the read speed of a sine wave lookup table. While it’s still quite new to me, I experimented with it in Max and was able to make a playable synth using this technique in Max 4 Live, featuring 8-voice polyphony, ADSR envelopes for each parameter, a general and key-tracking tone control, and pitch-bend. Looking soon to add some more parameters like unison and other small gadgets before cleaning up the UI and may look to have it released on the Ableton M4L store.

2020:

The Nastifier (Revisited):

During my internship at Death By Audio Effects in Fall of 2020, I worked to develop my pedal The Nastifier, a design from years back, into a proper effects pedal. This new design scraps the bias control for a “Snarl” knob which acts as a crossfader before the distortion amp between a clean boosted signal and a rectified signal slammed into a transistor amplifier, along with many other adjustments to the circuit, including a modified tone control and the ability to use a battery or a standard 9V connector. This project is still in development though I am looking to start producing them for sale in the near future.

2019:

The CCD-1828:

Demonstration of myself playing guitar through the CCD-1828 on a breadboard with an oscilloscope showing the output signal. The drive and tone are controlled over USB MIDI CC values from my computer using Ableton Live.

For my second guitar pedal project, I decided to create a pedal based on the circuit architecture of the classic Boss DS-1 distortion, with the addition of MIDI control which can change the tone and gain through USB. More information on the process for making this and the circuit itself can be found on my electronics website.

2018:

The Nastifier:

This was my first large electronics project done during my second semester at NYU. It’s an analog guitar pedal with a heavy distortion and rectifier octave circuit, with the inclusion of an adjustable lowpass filter and a knob which moves the bias of the signal up and down before the clipping stage, which gives it a more nasally and snarling sound. More info at my electronics website.