SILVER APPLE: WILD OSCILLATING FUZZ
Oh boy, what areyou getting yourself into!? The Silver Apple is a wild beast of a fuzz or maybe a synthesizer or both. It’s named after both the first electronic music record and a great psychedelic band with good reason. Sure, you can get some pretty normal drive sounds out of it if you turn down the gain a bit and don’t dial in any glitch and turn your guitar volume down a little, but where’s the fun in that? (actually that’s pretty fun, too). The Silver Apple really excels at producing liquid leads, dying video game arpeggios, nearly infinite sustaining banshee-like fuzz, and even some pseudo suboctave sounds.
A version of Silver Apple was actually the earliest Shoe Pedals design. It sports more optimized and user-friendly control ranges, oscillation bleed protection, and reverse bias protection, and a low pass tone control to filter out unwanted treble, compared to the “WC” that inspired it. However, it also has a very fun defining feature. Silver Apple allows you to toggle between two different tunable oscillations (or non-oscillations if you prefer) with a soft-touch momentary footswitch and magnetic relay system. Grab onto specific notes in your leads! Glitch out at a moment’s notice! Produce stabs of instant analog synth tones. Honestly you don’t even need to plug anything into this pedal to play it if you don’t want to. Run it through some delay and create a siren sound. Pitch shifters and vibratos are great fun as well. This pedal is intended to be played actively by foot (or hand) as an extension of your instrument or as a different instrument entirely. Have fun!
Controls:
Volume (Top Left): Sets the output level of the pedal.
Secondary Pitch (Top Middle Left): This is used to set the pitch you will hear and interfere with when you are holding down the momentary oscillation switch. The pitch gets lower as you turn to the left and disappears eventually as you turn all the way to the right. This pitch will also interact with the Gain and Tone controls so be sure to set those how you’d like before tuning. I recommend running the Silver Apple before your pedal tuner so you can mute the pedal while tuning and also see what note you have selected.
Gate (Top Middle Right): This knob pinches off oscillations and background noise. The farther left you turn it, the more “open” the sound and also the more oscillations you will hear in the standard mode. Turn this knob to the right until you can hear a very faint background noise for the longest sustaining oscillation notes while you are playing (typically around 1 o’ clock on the knob). Turn it up even farther for more staccato and pinched sounds reminiscent of video games. When the momentary switch is pressed, this knob is bypassed into a fully gate setting so you will get full oscillation.
Primary Pitch (Top Right): This works exactly the same as secondary Pitch except that it interacts with the Gate knob and is also your default pitch setting when the momentary oscillation switch is not engaged. The easiest way to tune the pedal is to dial back the gate below noon so that you hear some background noise, tune to a desired oscillation pitch with the Primary Pitch knob, and then raise the gate up to the point where you can barely hear any background noise if you wish to not hear oscillation when you are not playing.
Tone (Bottom Left): A simple Low Pass filter. This is used to tame any unwanted high end you do not wish to hear. It also changes the pedal’s resonance and interacts with the oscillation tone of the pedal so you may want to set this to the desired tonality before tuning to a desired pitch.
Gain (Bottom Right): This controls the input gain of the pedal. For more saturated sounds turn to the right. For more open sounds (and higher oscillation pitch ranges) turn to the left. For the absolute highest oscillation pitches available, you may also want to turn the tone knob to the right. You may not want to tune up that high, though. Just saying.
True Bypass (Left Footswitch): This bypasses the pedal and also eliminates any possible oscillation bleedthrough when bypassed. Leaving the pedal on a wild setting when it’s off is not a problem.
Wild Oscillation Switch (Right Footswitch): Hold down this button to generate wild oscillations tuned to the pitch of your choice. Great fun!
POWER: Please note that SHOE pedals do not run on batteries. You will need a standard 2.1 mm center negative 9V power supply (as used on most pedals) in order to run them. Power consumption is extremely low for all SHOE pedals (less than 5mA and for some pedals even below 1mA) so virtually any pedal power supply of the correct polarity can run more than one SHOE pedal on a daisy chain.
A version of Silver Apple was actually the earliest Shoe Pedals design. It sports more optimized and user-friendly control ranges, oscillation bleed protection, and reverse bias protection, and a low pass tone control to filter out unwanted treble, compared to the “WC” that inspired it. However, it also has a very fun defining feature. Silver Apple allows you to toggle between two different tunable oscillations (or non-oscillations if you prefer) with a soft-touch momentary footswitch and magnetic relay system. Grab onto specific notes in your leads! Glitch out at a moment’s notice! Produce stabs of instant analog synth tones. Honestly you don’t even need to plug anything into this pedal to play it if you don’t want to. Run it through some delay and create a siren sound. Pitch shifters and vibratos are great fun as well. This pedal is intended to be played actively by foot (or hand) as an extension of your instrument or as a different instrument entirely. Have fun!
Controls:
Volume (Top Left): Sets the output level of the pedal.
Secondary Pitch (Top Middle Left): This is used to set the pitch you will hear and interfere with when you are holding down the momentary oscillation switch. The pitch gets lower as you turn to the left and disappears eventually as you turn all the way to the right. This pitch will also interact with the Gain and Tone controls so be sure to set those how you’d like before tuning. I recommend running the Silver Apple before your pedal tuner so you can mute the pedal while tuning and also see what note you have selected.
Gate (Top Middle Right): This knob pinches off oscillations and background noise. The farther left you turn it, the more “open” the sound and also the more oscillations you will hear in the standard mode. Turn this knob to the right until you can hear a very faint background noise for the longest sustaining oscillation notes while you are playing (typically around 1 o’ clock on the knob). Turn it up even farther for more staccato and pinched sounds reminiscent of video games. When the momentary switch is pressed, this knob is bypassed into a fully gate setting so you will get full oscillation.
Primary Pitch (Top Right): This works exactly the same as secondary Pitch except that it interacts with the Gate knob and is also your default pitch setting when the momentary oscillation switch is not engaged. The easiest way to tune the pedal is to dial back the gate below noon so that you hear some background noise, tune to a desired oscillation pitch with the Primary Pitch knob, and then raise the gate up to the point where you can barely hear any background noise if you wish to not hear oscillation when you are not playing.
Tone (Bottom Left): A simple Low Pass filter. This is used to tame any unwanted high end you do not wish to hear. It also changes the pedal’s resonance and interacts with the oscillation tone of the pedal so you may want to set this to the desired tonality before tuning to a desired pitch.
Gain (Bottom Right): This controls the input gain of the pedal. For more saturated sounds turn to the right. For more open sounds (and higher oscillation pitch ranges) turn to the left. For the absolute highest oscillation pitches available, you may also want to turn the tone knob to the right. You may not want to tune up that high, though. Just saying.
True Bypass (Left Footswitch): This bypasses the pedal and also eliminates any possible oscillation bleedthrough when bypassed. Leaving the pedal on a wild setting when it’s off is not a problem.
Wild Oscillation Switch (Right Footswitch): Hold down this button to generate wild oscillations tuned to the pitch of your choice. Great fun!
POWER: Please note that SHOE pedals do not run on batteries. You will need a standard 2.1 mm center negative 9V power supply (as used on most pedals) in order to run them. Power consumption is extremely low for all SHOE pedals (less than 5mA and for some pedals even below 1mA) so virtually any pedal power supply of the correct polarity can run more than one SHOE pedal on a daisy chain.