Eldritch Blast
Eldritch Blast
Eldritch Blast is a fuzz built around a high-gain octave/intermodulation generator. This unusual transistor circuit is capable of heavy, complex riffs or touch-sensitive textures with a ripping, splatty octave up. And its switchable active EQ invokes sinister high-gain tones worthy of the outer gods.
The development of the Eldritch Blast has origins in the early days of EAE. It is a greatly expanded take on the Magic Missile Fuzz, an old design of ours which is an homage to the modern classic fuzzes of Devi Ever, Tim Escobedo, and all of the circuit-bending weirdos on ilovefuzz.com. We teamed up with Alec from Mask Audio Electronics (MAE) to flesh out and fine-tune the design, and together came up with a result which significantly diverged from the original Magic Missile circuit.
For Eldritch Blast Version 3, available starting in April 2023, we revisited the function of the Chaos toggle. Rather than the gated mode of previous iterations, the Chaos toggle now engages a dynamic oscillation mode that creates sub octave glitches, atonal arpeggios, and other strange sounds that we haven’t discovered yet. If you have a V2, see here to get yours retrofitted.
Finally, we’d like to thank Dan from Audio Disruption Devices for the stellar art design!
Electrical Specifications
Bypass: Relay switching with true bypass
Input impedance @ 1 Khz: 220kΩ
Output impedance @ 1 Khz: 1kΩ
Power: 9V DC, 2.1 mm center negative barrel. The current draw is 80mA with both channels engaged.
We recommend a regulated, isolated power supply rated for 100 mA minimum. The PSU input is protected against reverse polarity. Our pedals do not accept batteries.
Controls
Gain: Controls amount of gain and low frequencies at input. Turn clockwise to add gain and thickness.
More: Controls amount of signal feeding octave circuit. Use to adjust the sensitivity of intermodulation textures.
Tone: Active peaking filters working on the highs and midrange simultaneously. Only in use when star footswitch is on.
Bass: Active peaking filter centered around 100 Hz. Only in use when star footswitch is on.
Volume: Loudness amount.
Splat: Shifts the dynamics and gating of the transistor stages, switching between a smoother character or a harsh note decay with splatty artifacts.
Mode: Changes transistors in the octave generator to change the texture and amount of saturation.
Chaos: Engages a self-oscillating mode with highly interactive squeals, squealches, and sub-bass drones.
Engage Footswitch: Master bypass.
Star Footswitch: EQ on/off.
Changelog
V3 (Current as of April 2023)
- Redesigned Chaos toggle, now produces an oscillating effect
- Significant increase in range of More control
- Significant increase in gain and output volume, more than both V1 and V2V2 (2021)
- SMT PCB layout
- Soft touch bypass
- Added Chaos toggle (this version creates a gated texture)
- Increased headroom of active EQ (Tone/Bass) controls
- Slightly less gain and output volume relative to V1V1 (2018)
- Initial release
- Thru hole PCB
- Mechanical bypass switching
- No Chaos toggle