CONTAINS NO PUMPKIN
And when it became mid-summer, and the people were still wearing short pants and not yet beginning to contemplate cozy sweaters or reasonable dew points, the form of the destructor was chosen.
And the first seal was opened, and I heard, as if it were the noise of an espresso machine detonating, four and twenty trees bursting. From the debris of the trees came a brown horse: upon it rode Cinnamon, as cinnamon apparently comes from tree bark? And Cinnamon (which sounds like a stripper name, but is not in this context) was given a scepter made of cinnamon stick, and went forth spreading a drying, burning dust like that of 144,000 cinnamon challenges.
And the second seal was opened. And there went another brown horse, this one the color of a caffè latte made by an automated caffè latte machine: upon it rode Nutmeg, which is a less good stripper name. Smoldering cinders of nutmeg ash fell all around her, and many well-known facts about nutmeg were referenced, I assure you.
And then the third seal was opened and I beheld a lighter brown horse, the color of the goo atop a caramel macchiato: upon it rode a woman wearing a Union Jack styled as a dress. I said unto her, “Who art thou?” and she replied, “Are you daft? I’m Geri Halliwell. Are you not getting the theme, mate?” And I wept, because I had no idea who she was, but she did smell vaguely of Ginger Spice (a stripper I once knew).
And then the fourth seal was opened and lo, there was a great earthquake. The sun became as black as Starbucks coffee and the air smelled as musty and charred as Starbucks coffee. The darkest brown horse appeared, the color of cold brew: upon it was a goth woman smoking a Sampoerna. She was Clove, and I said unto her, “This is surely a spicetastrophe of biblical proportion; let me ride with thee, for thou art rad.” She winked and said “I would, but I’m about to turn into a pumpkin,” and rode off, sprinkling cloves on hams and mixing them with saccharine and Victory Gin and doing whatever else you do with cloves.
Details
Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse can be broken down into three sections:
Input Buffer/Pickup Sim: Some pedals—especially old-school transistor gain pedals—can only sound their best when they’re connected directly to a guitar. That’s fine if you only ever have one pedal, or if the needy one is always first in the chain, but sometimes you may want to put it after something else, potentially something with a buffer, and then it might sound terrible. One option to overcome that is to introduce a pickup simulator. I did this before in the Anhedonia pedal, which uses a Jack Orman-style pickup simulator—basically a coil from a transformer masquerading as a coil in a guitar pickup. Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse, however, employs aotmr’s Midlands pickup sim, which is an active circuit that replicates the frequency response of a guitar pickup interacting with the front-end of a pedal. The “Nature” and “Gain” controls in his schematic are the RES (resonance) and FUZZ controls in the Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse.
Fuzz: This started out as an Escobedo Tripple Fuzz, which is supposedly a “nonselective frequency tripler.” I found some schematics for something called a Lovepedal Karl that was an adaptation of the Tripple, and took a bunch of stuff from that. There are specific settings where it will hint at an octave effect, or maybe even a tiny touch of ring mod, but those aspects are pretty subtle and it’s primarily a raucous fuzz. This is probably not a representative implementation since the Midlands can hit it with over 20dB of boost (at least at some frequencies), but regardless, I find it interesting.
Tone: I only used half of a dual op-amp for the pickup sim. Rather than stick a low pass filter on the end and use the extra op-amp as an output buffer, I decided to put in the active tilt control from the Bigger Muff (the same tone control that’s in The Wreck of the Ella Fitzgerald). To keep the number of knobs down, I replaced the “Mids” control with a fixed resistor that represents the knob 80% of the way up, which puts back most of the mids that would be scooped out of a traditional Muff tone control.
Vital Stats
Sound
It took me a while to understand that the Midlands pickup sim isn’t actually kicking out an instrument-level signal and then letting nature take its course: it’s simulating the entire result of a guitar pickup hitting a lo-Z effect, including the exaggerated resonance that would be created by the input cap interacting with the coil (while also acting as an input buffer and initial boost). The RES knob on Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse controls the resonant peak, and is kind of like a pre-fuzz tone control, but in practice it sounds almost like switching between the neck and bridge pickups of a guitar with a blend, which I find to be highly intriguing. The FUZZ control is really a volume control that lowers the signal coming out of the first stage, and reduces fuzz in the same way that turning down a guitar’s volume will clean up a Fuzz Face. I fiddled with limiting the range of this knob because I didn’t want it to ever be silent or driving the fuzz into blocking distortion over a huge portion of the sweep (although it will still go into blocking wide-open).
My pedal guru has described fuzz as “the simplest and most ubiquitous guitar effect, on account of being able to achieve it whether you want it or not.” Indeed, fuzz was initially created by accident, and may be benefiting from ongoing accidents today. Case in point, I can not assert with certainty that all of the components in the fuzz section of this pedal are actually doing anything to contribute to its sound, but it certainly does fuzz. There are also clipping diodes on the end, and I’d like to say that I tried thousands of combinations of rare Soviet diodes made of exotic elements, but the experimentation consisted of, “Two 4148s? Wait, one 4148 and a BAT41? Oh, that’s cool.”
The TONE knob is the tilt EQ, which is maybe a little heavy-handed and only useful in a narrow portion around the middle of its sweep, but it’s nice to have options, and the ideal setting does vary with the position of the RES knob.
Here are some samples with the Coronacaster > Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse > Deluxe-ish amp
FUZZ Control:
RES Control:
TONE Control:
Here it is on bass, with the Pandemic Bass > Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse > DI with the slightest touch of room reverb in post
Fuzz Bass
