I wasn't quite sure where to post this but, seeing as I've just
made
this ... er? .... device .... I thought 'Making & Modding' was as
good a place as any. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you .....
The Stylotron
I bought a Stylophone (one of the reissue ones - no mention of Rolf to be seen anywhere in the promotional literature) last Christmas when my local Maplins were clearing them out at a tenner. It was an impulse purchase and I had no real idea what I was going to do with it. Now, 8 months later, it has finally got a use - as the Stylo
tron.
I've mounted it onto a board along with an 'analogue' delay pedal (actually a Belcat digital faux-analogue delay that I won in one of the Fretboard Composition Challenges) and a controller box with the power in, signal out and also a send/return insert loop for additional fx. The Stylophone normally runs off 3 batteries at 4.5Vdc but I've soldered connections to the battery compartment so that I can run it from a power supply. One complication was that the Stylophone runs off 4.5V and the delay off 9V and I wanted a single power input for the whole thing. I managed this by building a basic voltage divider inside the control box with a couple of wire wound resistors. It all now runs off of a standard 9V adaptor - the delay gets the full 9V and the Stylophone gets half that - 4.5V.
The board has a threaded mic stand insert on the base so the whole thing can be mounted on a mic stand and adjusted for playing position as you can see here ...
I've just finished it and had a quick twiddle through a pedal board containing fuzz, pitch shift, flanger and two more delays and a volume pedal to allow adjusting the note attack (the Stylophone is basically on/off using its little in-built stylus) - it's great!
Comments
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein