On some pedals, cool things happen when you don’t give it the right voltage.

You can do this with some powering solutions that have “dying battery simulators.”

The Germanium OD has one built right in!

Has anyone tried dying battery sims with their pedals?

I tried it with my Little Big Muff and it makes it act more like a distortion/OD, It becomes far more touch sensitive.

I made a little box once that controls voltage, you could hook it into any pedal, kinda like the beavis de-volt. I noted that a lot of fuzz sounds good with less than 9 volts but modulation sounds pretty bad, small clones start to break up and start sounding like an OD. Digital Delay can be interesting on 4 volts.

I want to try this with the big box Worm. I’ve read some reviews, where some have dropped the voltage and it lowers the background noise.

I’ve heard that as well

yup, it does get rid of some noise.

nightraven - 06 December 2008 05:53 AM

yup, it does get rid of some noise.

Cool.

Did you buy a lower voltage adapter for it? If you have one of those power starve thingies, which one did you use?

It comes stock with a 24volt adapter.  I found a 14volt adaptor that had the same polarity and same size barrel jack.  That alone got rid of 95% of the noise.

Dave

Royal8 - 16 December 2008 08:24 PM

It comes stock with a 24volt adapter.  I found a 14volt adaptor that had the same polarity and same size barrel jack.  That alone got rid of 95% of the noise.

Dave

Cool, what brand was it? My local shop didn’t have the correct barrel size.

does it change the sound or reduce headroom at all?

I don’t remember what brand or size it was.  I sold it back in May.  It didn’t seem to lose head room; it did, however, seem to reduce the signal to unity.  With the 24v it was very…gainy.  It sounded like an idle tube amp with the gain turned up.  Very “white noiseish.”  The lower voltage cleared it up immediately.

Dave

I see

For those of you who also use your pedals on keyboards, I make use of the Germanium OD to make a poor man’s Fender Rhodes Electric Piano sound. The effect really shines on keyboards that have touch response abilities. You basically just choose the crappy electronic piano setting on your Yamaha keyboard, or whatever, put it through the Germanium, and anytime you play with more attack on the keys (louder notes), the Germanium kicks in just like the high gain, overdriven sounds on the Rhodes and Wurlitzers do. Softer playing equals no overdrive.

Obviously, you’ll never accurately recreate the sound of a Rhodes in this manner, but you can come incredibly close without shelling the money and space to own the real thing.

And if you have a vibrato or tremolo pedal, you have the poor man’s Wurlitzer too.

I’ve built myself a Muff Fuzz clone with a voltage knob :D right around 5v it gets very gated and synthy, putting it before a distorted tube amp gives me an enormously fat gated sound, very inspiring! :D

I came onto it when I was experimenting with my EHX Muff Fuzz and a 5 volt power supply I had laying around.

I didn’t want to chop up my nice EHX pedal so I built a clone and included the voltage control and a SHO booster, with makes it even fatter :D

Check out the Germanium4 Big Muff Pi. 4 NKT 275 germanium transistors. Independent overdrive and seperate Distortion. Each has 2 Germaniums that can be stacked to a 4 Germanium set.

The distortion has a volts and bias control. They are also available when both the distortion and overdrive works together.

Very cool with great sound. Once you start experimenting, you will see the very wide variety of killing sounds.