The Mighty Oak

Concept

Modern Problems

We have noticed some things missing from modern, feature rich guitar pedals..

1 - Visual Feedback

Modern pedals have taken to saving the state of the effect's knobs as a preset, to be recalled later. This is great, except that when you come back to that preset none of the knobs are actually pointing to their real value anymore - and one knob can control many different parameters. To be able to tweak their sound on the fly guitarists end up memorizing their own settings, which defeats the purpose of presets in the first place.

2 - Foot Accessible Presets

Many pedals now come with multiple modes and functions, each yielding wildly different sounds. This is also great, except that it leads to a feeling of neglect when only one or two of these sounds is used on a gig. Who wants to bend down and knob tweak during a show? Midi controllers are often the key to unlocking these stomp boxes, but these require extra money, space, and time learning tech rather than playing guitar.

Our Solution

The Mighty Oak is our solution to these problems. We are working to create a user interface for guitar pedals that maximizes the interactive potential of a circuit whilst minimizing complexity. We are always keeping two things in mind..

Nothing Hidden

The goal of The Mighty Oak is provide an array of features without ever sacrificing the visibility of it's settings. We will do this with colour coded representations of control knobs displayed on an LCD, which will show the settings for the current (or most recently active, if bypassed) preset. Physical knobs will be eliminated and replaced with footswitches that allow the user to "scroll" a setting, up or down depending on which tactile button is held. Each of the six footswitches is linked to two settings, the status of each indicated by dots and rings on the LCD.

Easy Presets

Each footswitch is it's own user preset, which saves settings automatically when clicked off (this can be to bypass or to another preset). This eliminates any need to press and hold to save, or press a special button. Each preset can be toggled between latching or momentary bypass by triple pressing. The current bypass mode of the preset will be indicated by the colour of the LED.

Applications

The flexibillity of the user interface allows for many applications, and would excel in purely digital processing such as reverbs or synthesizers. However, our first application of this interface will be in an all analog fuzz pedal: The Mighty Oak.

Functional Requirements

All analog signal path
11 parameters of signal path - Volume, Gain, Tone, Mids, Bias, Gate, Clean Blend, Clean Low Pass, Octave Up Blend, Wave Folding, Feedback
"Chaos" feature which modulates 11 parameters pseudo randomly
Six user presets accessible by individual footswitches
Presets save automatically
Settings of preset always visible
Momentary and latching bypass
Less than 300mA current draw
Fit into a Hammond 1590 enclosure