Cryptid Effects

Shop: cryptideffects.com

Elsewhere: Instagram and YouTube

Why#

Most of the other projects on this page exist because of this one. Cryptid Effects is my pedal company: hand-wired guitar and bass effects, each named for a cryptid or a bit of folklore, designed and assembled in the wilds beyond Austin, Texas. I build the pedals I find interesting and enjoy playing, and every design gets used on the road before it goes up for sale.

The pedals#

• Indrid Cold. The signature fuzz, named for the Smiling Man of Mothman lore. A high-gain transistor fuzz fronted with an asymmetric soft-clipping op amp gain stage and followed by a bypassable active tone control. Quiet at rest and very responsive to pick attack.
• Raiju Fuzz. A take on the 1970s Shin-Ei Super Fuzz with the transistors replaced by op amps for better chord clarity and a stronger octave, and the original tone control swapped for a resonant low-pass filter. Named for the thunder beast of Japanese mythology.
• The Everlasting Tantrum. An enhanced build of an unreleased fuzz from between two well-known pedal makers: three MPSA18s and a 2N2907A, a mid-70s ram’s head tone stack that can be bypassed, and a control that pushes the circuit into self-oscillation.
• The Siam Howler. A fuzz born from chasing the Siamese Dream tone, named for the Ozark Howler by way of a rabbit hole that ended in Thailand.
• Xaninos. A filter pedal built around a state variable filter that splits the signal into high-pass, band-pass, and low-pass bands, so you can shape your tone and blend additional tones in parallel with it. Named for the changeling children of Asturian folklore.

Each pedal ships with an instruction manual, and the manuals are also on the site.

How it connects to the rest#

The bench tools on this page grew out of building these. The Tayda UV Artwork Processor prepares the enclosure artwork, Sightings matches and bins the transistors, and Akashic lives at a Cryptid Effects subdomain because the research for new circuits starts there.