oxide deconstruction

  

OXIDE FUZZ OF-1 05/25

This circuit was inspired by the dwarfcraft great destroyer. The destroyer has a simplicity and anihilating sound that is quite impressive.  I got a good lust for the effect after listening to Merzbow tracks from a certain period. Masami obviously treasures his dwarfcraft boxes with epic volumes dedicated to the pitchgrinder double-beat combo.

Unfourtunately the chip that was used, a buffered cmos inverter cant be found anywhere to purchase. From the original datasheet I found a schematic showing that each buffered inverter is just 5 mos inverters in series. You can link 5 ube stages for a single invertion which gives possibly as much grunt as the original. In my recreation there is a chip used for each of the 3 gain stages. Each chip with one spare inverter left over which arent much use for anything as far as I can tell because the energy of the others is too strong.

Because the circuit is simple and the chip layout nicely symetrical it can be soldered together point to point, without having to design circuit boards. 

I made a good dozen of these with spontaneous deviations, experimenting with variations to the circuit via switches and knobs and component ratios.

In the destroyer there is a capacitor and resistor in series followed by three gain inverters. 1 and 2 are directly linked and 2-3 is capacitor coupled. Feedback pots are included for the first and 3rd stages, the 1st stage is gain and the 3rd is tone. The output (volume) is unbuffered and has a tuning and gating effect wich saves you a knob so long as your ok with a full blast output.

Its best (though more confounding) to include a feedback pot for the middle stage. I'm conviced it maximises textures, tones and versatility.. There is a notch on the 2nd inverter where there is a wonderful effect that seems to open up another frequency spectrum.

The output of the first stage is strongest and preserves more of the fundamental signal. the subsequent stages sound as if imprinted into it . The output from the 3rd stage is more completely destroyed or compressed and the volume is smaller. I've tried selcting with toggle but the 3rd inverter but the volume difference was too great. 

The power starve is done simply with 2k log pot. I have tried sinking current with a transistor so as to control it with voltage. This works well but the effect doesnt have quite the same disjointed esctatic chaos feeling but rather a smoother synthy nature. I will include this on the next pcb iteration so i can have both options.