A PLL-ish guitar synth pedal. Sounds massive. And loud. And gnarly.

It’s not a true PLL, but it started as my attempt to make one. What I ended up with is close and different and pretty cool, I think.

The audio signal enters through a fuzz. From the fuzz, one path splits off and gets bit crushed. A pitch detector tracks two square wave oscillators, set at intervals, which then get fed into a bit modulator, set to XOR (AND also produces nice results). The output of the bit modulator is mixed with the fuzz, then sent through an envelope controlled filter and VCA. After that, it goes through a pitch shifter set to a fifth above and connected to the left stompswitch.

The bitcrushed fuzz and the filtered oscillators get mixed, then exit through a gate, because this one’s noisy.

Like most of these effects, it works best if played monophonically, but that’s a suggestion, not a rule. I got some interesting sounds ignoring that.

Page 0–audio in, audio out (blue)
Gate (aqua)
**Adjust gate to taste
Bit crushed fuzz/oscillator mix (white)
Fuzz and bit crusher (yellow)

Page 1–pitch shifter (green)
Pitch detection (yellow)
Oscillator 1 (blue–change the pitch with the aqua value module)
–This one has a slew limiter affecting its glide
Oscillator 2 (red–change the pitch with the aqua value module)
–This one has an LFO varying its duty cycle/PWM

**I put the interval values where I thought it sounded good, but there’s a lot of interesting harmonic and inharmonic possibilities.

Page 2–bit modulator/filter/vca/envelope (magenta)

**As I mentioned at the top, changing the bit modulator from XOR to AND yields different, good (though less gnarly) results. OR, not so much.

**You might want to adjust the envelope, depending on taste

Unbitcrushed fuzz/bit modulator output mix (white)

Enters and exits stereo, signal path is mono.