Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Moogerfooger/Looper Order Switcher

There's a new song in the works at Zaardvark Inc. that requires me to record a guitar loop with some Moogerfooger sounds applied and recorded with the loop. But the board is wired so that the looper is before the 'foogers, because sometimes I like to record a clean loop and bend it separately.

So what I need is a box that reverses the order of the set of Moog pedals and the looper - and possibly the Freeze - as a separate group.

This'll do it:


A IN/OUT (aka send/return) connect to the input of the first 'fooger (FreqBox) and the output of the last (Ring Mod.). B connects to the looper. IN is routed to OUT through the two pedal groups in the order selected by the 3PDT switch.

I made a space on the board:


Drilled some holes in a box:


Sockets + wires:

To avoid ground loops I just connected the grounds of the IN, OUT, A IN and B IN sockets. We'll see whether that's good enough.

I don't need to switch the order with my foot so it's just a manually-operated toggle switch:


No LED either - I can see the pedal order by the position of the switch.

Testing:

Velcro applied and in-situ:

The whole board:

In the end I decided to group the Freeze and looper together as group B. It means that the input and output for the whole board are the switch box IN and OUT, which is tidy.

The use of metal plugs could undermine the anti-ground loop strategy, but it doesn't seem to be a problem if they touch each other.

The plastic box isn't really robust enough so I might replace it with a diecast box if I can find one that fits the space available and has enough room for all the sockets.

The next project is to replace the black box to the right of the new one. It's an Arduino-based CV generator and Freeze controller. I'd like one with lots more outputs and a load of other features I haven't finalised yet.

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