Divider Tremolo

A fairly "new" and interesting idea, if I dare say so myself, which I do apparently. Using a CMOS divider chip to get LFOs by dividing the guitar frequency.

Scroll down for stripboard layout!

Shivery Timbres

Check the vid above for a quick run through of how this works, but I'll go over it again quickly here.

By amping up the guitar signal to logic levels, we can feed it into the clock pin of the 4040. Each 4040 output pin will then give us divisions of the guitar freqency.

A rotary switch lets us select between the subdivisions, and the selected one controls a tremolo. This slightly unusual LED - LDR set up (below) shunts the signal to ground on every clock pulse, letting us use faster LFO speeds.

Here's the full schematic for the simpler, 1-rotary-switch version of this pedal:

And here's a stripboard layout for that design:

I made an effort to keep the power and ground for the 4040 separate from the power and ground for the TL074. This is to prevent ticking coming through on the audio path, hense the power enters the board in the middle.

Same reason for the 100uf caps across each chip's power pins and the LED.

You could have fun sending a second subdivision to a momentary footswitch, as I've done in the vid above.

For your perusal, here's the full schematic for my 2-rotary-switch pedal (the one in the video) which also features a PIC microcontroller and relay as a bypass switch.