Today, with hindsight, basking in the after-glow of all the wonderful discoveries and inventions made by electrical engineers at RCA, Leo Fender and, relatively recent developments in electronics technology, comes the realisation that the old phase-shift LFO can be improved… a lot. There’s no audio signal passing through the LFO, it simply generates a sinusoidal control voltage, so it doesn’t really matter if that voltage is generated with tubes, transistors, mechanically or digitally—after all it’s only turning the brightness of a lamp up and down. Technically, that control would be much better achieved digitally using DDS (Direct Digital Synthesis). DDS makes it possible to synthesise any type of analogue waveform—sine, square, triangle, rising or falling ramps, pulse, arbitrary wave forms, that is, any wave shape that can be imagined. Like Dr McCoy said, “I know engineers—they love to change things.”, and we do—so we lashed togehter a novel mixed wave generator and shoehorned two of these cool control circuits into our new model “DT-2A” Delta-Trem Raysistor Tremolo-Panner pedal.
But limitless possibilities would surely create chaos and madness for any working guitarist attempting to dial in their favourite tremolo setting whilst gigging. So to make things more straightforward and intuitive we limited the Delta-Trem to three fundamental waveform types (‘Filament’, ‘Fluid and ‘Neon’). Each of these can be selected via a three-way toggle switch on the rear panel of the pedal. Further, the waveform type can be twisted and morphed into radically different pulse shapes using a ‘Shape’ knob. This, in combination with the ‘Width’ and ‘Speed’ knobs, makes it possible to sculpt an array of different types of tremolo quickly and intuitively.
