Dark Waters Mini - Handwired Pedal - Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water Clone

Description

Dark Waters Mini Modulator - Handwired Guitar Pedal - Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water Clone.
Shipped with USPS Priority Mail.
This pedal is based around the Pedal PCB Low Tide Mini ( https://www.pedalpcb.com/product/pcb467/ ), which itself is a clone of the Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water pedal. To me, this is not just one of the best modulation pedals ever created, it is one of the best pedals ever created — full stop. Depending on my mood, this may actually be my favorite guitar pedal ever, in any category. This version is arguably superior to the original, for while it sounds and works exactly the same as the full size version, it takes up half the space on your pedal board.
When watching pedal demos, I hate when hipster, cork sniffing YouTube personalities describe a pedal by saying stuff like, “this pedal is the sonic equivalent of your middle school crush being sent to military school,” or other equally random garbage. However, with this pedal, I get where those spacy, hippy descriptions come from. This pedal is absolutely a modulation pedal and with some settings you can get pretty conventional chorus and vibrato sounds. However, I
promise
that this is not what you will use this pedal for. Instead you are going to use it to create slightly off-kilter tape warble artifacts that sound like over played-vinyl that has been mastered through an old cassette deck. You might use this pedal to add a unique low pass gated filter that makes it sound like you are playing underwater through an amp that is covered with weighted blankets. You will use this pedal to create a not quite distortion, slightly overdriven sound that only affects the very edges of your tone. Dial these sounds up together and you have a unique low-fi sound, built not around lowering the bit rate of your sound (i.e. making it sound worse) but by adding random glitches in your harmonics and via unique filter sounds. When I first built this pedal, I liked it, but it took me a long time to really understand the breadth of sounds in this single box. This might be one of the most versatile musical devices I have ever played and I discover new sounds in it all the time. Really, I LOVE this pedal and the sounds it creates.
With that said, this is a pedal with a very steep learning curve. While the mix and the volume controls are self explanatory, the skew, depth, rate and gate knobs are EXTREMELY interactive and an adjustment to one, changes how the other three fundamentally work. The depth controls the amount of chorus / vibrato that is on tap. However, this modulation is not constant — instead the gate adjusts how much of this modulation can actually make it through the pedal. Fully clockwise and everything is let through, fully counter clockwise and nothing gets through and your whole tone sounds like you are playing through a really aggressive and thick low pass filter. Rate controls the frequency of the random glitch warble that is the hallmark of this pedal. Technically this circuit is an analog K-Field modulator which is this random warble that accents the sound. Skew is the shape of the modulation AND the random K-Field glitch — fully counter clockwise is square and makes the glitchy warble chorus slightly ring mod-esque. With skew fully clockwise your modulation becomes subtle and almost imperceptible. The sounds in this pedal range from barely noticeable to completely over the top, to everything in-between. A simple two paragraph description cannot properly describe the sounds this pedal can create — please check out some samples of the original on YouTube — this version sounds EXACTLY like the original.
This pedal was hand-built and hand-wired and has been fully tested. The pedal was built with top-of the line parts: 1% tolerance metal resistors, silicone wiring, higher quality capacitors, the whole shebang.
Heck, the cost for the mojo bucket brigade IC chip accounts for a giant chunk of the listed starting bid of this pedal. I sourced the parts myself, so I could get the highest quality components possible. I am only selling because I need the space more than I need the gear. Please see the photos for condition -- what you see is what you get. Please email with any questions or concerns. This pedal works perfectly and is in great condition. The photos included are of the actual items you will receive. Thanks for looking.