SUBDECAY PEDALS AT THE GUITAR ATTIC

The LIQUID SHUNSHINE is the latest achievement from Subdecay Studios. The Liquid Sunshine can be anything from a clean boost tone enhancer, to a gritty overdrive. But don’t confuse this with your average overdrive, it is NOT a TS clone like so many others made today.

TS circuits use opamps, and diodes in a single clipping stage, something you wont find in a the Liquid Sunshine. It uses Jfet amplifiers, and has two gain stages for a smoother response, and a more natural sounding pick attack.

The first thing you will notice about the Liquid Sunshine, is that it has two drive knobs, and no tone knob. Each drive knob controls a separate gain stage, and are very interactive. The top drive knob pushes the full frequency range in to a mild overdrive. The lower drive knob pushes just the middle and high frequencies, and colors the sound quite a bit. Many distinct voicings are available by simply twisting the dials. Don’t worry if you like that mid boost that so many overdrives have you can still dial it in. If you don’t want it, you can dial it out. The best tones are somewhere in between.

Features:

The Liquid Sunshine is hand made in Woodinville, WA with the high quality components.

Die cast metal enclosures for durability.

3PDT switches for true bypass switching.

Runs for many hours on a single 9 volt battery, or can be powered by a 9VDC adapter.

Red LED indicator.

Three-year limited warranty.

And it looks cool too.                   

$149.95 Call To Order

 
The MONEY SHOT is a super controllable envelope filter. It features a tri-tone paint job, 5 knob for maximum "tweakablility" The Money Shot uses bipolar transistors with a negative feedback filter, similar to a good old wah pedal. It has a different sound than many other envelope filters which use opamps in the filter section. This gives the effect a more natural sound, and wont make your ears bleed at gigging volumes.

So what does it do?

An envelope filter (sometimes called a dynamic wah or auto wah) does two basic things. First it senses the level of your signal (envelope) to create a control voltage. Second, it filters your guitar signal much like a wah pedal does. The filter cut off is controlled by the envelope voltage.

Why is the Money Shot different?

The Money Shot gives you lots of options and possible tones. The Money Shot has five knobs. Resonance, Sensitivity, High range, Low range, and Volume. Variable resonance allows you to go from subtle, to funky, to space alien territory. As the resonance gets higher the over all effect gets louder. The volume knob lets you adjust the overall level to match your rig. The high and low range knobs allow you to set the resting point and the peek point of the filter cut off frequency. The sensitivity knob allows you to use guitars with both hot and weak outputs. The sensitivity settings also can interact with the high range giving the filter some unique decay characteristics, including some almost modulated phaser like tones.

Features: The Money Shot is hand made in Woodinville, WA with the high quality components. Die cast metal enclosures for durability. 3PDT switches for true bypass switching. Runs on a single 9 volt battery, but we recommend powring by a 9VDC adapter. Red LED indicator. Three-year limited warranty. 

$199.95 Call To Order

 
Blackstar

Distortion - Get high gain and huge tone from this box.  Loads of sustain for blistering leads, and enough control to make any amp sound meaty and mean, yet harmonically rich and full..  For hard rock to metal and more.

What is the Blackstar?

 The Blackstar is a high gain distortion pedal especially suited for hard rock and heavy metal playing.  The Blackstar allows you to match the pedal to your guitar and amp... NOT the other way around.  Most high gain pedals fall flat because of their frequency response, or  because all the distortion is produced in one gain stage.

 Frequency response problems can happen at the input or output of the effect.  Too much bass response at the input can make the distortion muddy.  Of course bass response is dependant on the guitar used, and most distortion pedals do not allow for tweaking pre-gain bass response.  The lower drive knob is a bass frequency gain control and allows you to  "match" the pedal to your guitar.  Then there's the output.  A lot of high gain pedals sound great at low volumes, but just don't cut through the mix at rehearsal or on stage.  The Blackstars' tone control allows you to match the distortion to your amp, whether its a 1x10 combo, or a 4x12 stack.

The Blackstar produces its distortion through cascaded gain stages, much like a tube amp.  Each stage is a little different.  The first stage uses a mosfet.  The two following stages use hand picked jfets.  Jfets are known for producing even harmonics when overdriven, much like tubes in guitar amps.

Notes from the engineer:

Almost immediately after releasing the Liquid Sunshine, requests poured in for the same  pedal but with more gain.  After tinkering around I ended up moving on, and not giving it much thought for a while.

Then one day, while visiting Catalinbread in Seattle, The owner Nicholas Harris, and I decided to plug in some pedals.  He had told me once before that his Super Chile Picoso booster pedals worked really well with Liquid Sunshine.  We ended up plugging them in, and turning all the knobs up...  There was a lot of palm muting, pinch harmonics, and eyebrow raising going on.

I thought to my self, instead of adding a cascade of similar stages to the Liquid Sunshine Design, perhaps just a big fat clean boost added to the circuit would work.  I designed a circuit limiting my self to 3 knobs, and simply replaced the input buffer in the original design, with a simple clean boost circuit.  Within a couple weeks, I had a working prototype.  It was good, but it wasn't great.  The original design, just didn't have quite enough gain.  The drive knobs didn't interact in a complimentary way.

At this point, I decided this needed to be more than a simple afterthought of an existing design.  It needed to be something that would stand on it's own.  Instead of just pushing gain to the limits it needed to pushed over the top, and I knew it needed a really good tone control.

I ended up totally changing the way the drive knobs worked, and came up with a tone control design that complemented the effect.

$159.00 CALL TO ORDER

 
   The Stupid Box from Sub-Decay Studios. This stomp box was designed to be a super versitile distortion. The Stupid Box employs soft clipping just like vintage tube screamers, but driven much harder and with a full range frequency response. At maximum gain The Stupid Box creates a searing fuzz. At mid gain the tone control allows you to go from hard rock rock to heavy metal. At lower gain you can easily get some great blues tones, or use as a booster to drive your amp harder.

If you play a fender style amp, and don't want to give up your great clean tone, but have always been jealous of those guys with the Marshalls and Boogies the stupid box is what you have been waiting for. If you play a 2 channel high gain amp, and struggle for those in-between tones this is a great pedal to have. The Stupid Box has a variable frequency filter unlike most distortion boxes which only let you control the roll off, making it much easier to match the pedal to the natural voicing of your amp.

Features:

The Stupid Box is hand made in Woodinville, WA with the highest quality components.

Die cast metal enclosures for durability.

3PDT switches for true bypass switching.

Runs for many hours on a single 9 volt battery.

Green LED indicator.

A big giant smiley face you will never get tired of stepping on

$125.00 Call To Order

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