ABSTRACT
The Distortion and Fuzz circuit was the first step in the conversion of snaky analog waveforms into crisp digital signal. The musical applications of digital logic circuits go beyond simple oscillators and extreme distortion. Once it is accepted that any audio square wave can be regarded as a simple alternation between two binary numbers (0 and 1), the logical and arithmetic functions on which all digital calculations are based can be seen as potential sound transformations. Phase locked loops are versatile pitch tracking devices. They can be used to detect specific frequencies, convert a complex signal into a simple square wave, multiply or divide pitches by a factor, and more. The audio processors get us into a very wooly area of circuit conglomeration never anticipated by the original designers of these chips—trial-and-error is the best working method. This distortion-based pseudo-analog-to-digital conversion can be coupled with many other chips in the CMOS family, some of which will yield exquisite signal transformations.
