Metasonix TM-1 2nd gen

Waveshaper / Ringmod

The Metasonix TM-1's circuit is directly derived from the award-winning Metasonix TS-21 "Hellfire Modulator".

The pentode preamp gives pure tube distortion, from soft and creamy to screaming guitar-amp like leads. Just crank the input volume.

The "pulser" circuit injects small, badly-formed pulses on top of the signal, giving an effect roughly similar to very erratic (and violently unstable) VCO sync. Forget getting this effect from another synth, analog or digital; they just can't do it. It sounds out of control, yet it is easily tweaked over a broad range with the PULSER STABILITY knob. Subtle, or gross; a vast range of sonic manglings are at your fingertips. (The pulser circuit works best with sharp-edged electronic waveforms, especially those from digital synths or analog VCOs.)

Finally, a special beam-deflection vacuum tube gives both wavefolding and ring modulation (carrier is provided by an internal wide-range oscillator, or inject your own carrier signal). There is nothing quite like the cross-modulation produced by the beam tube, its nonlinearities and resulting tonal effects are distinctive. Crude and NASTY, too.

TM-1's pulser effect uses a positive feedback loop, so the circuit is not stable under all settings. This allows its use as a self-contained pseudorandom signal generator, by patching its output back to its input. You've read about "strange attractors" and other chaotic sound generation techniques? The TM-1 is the first all-tube chaotic sound generator. The results must be heard to be believed!

This is the 2nd generation, which uses a potentiometer for the Activate Ringmod feature, allowing a wider range of clean and distorted signal than the 1st gen version.