Stomp Box Basics:

Tremolo and Fuzz

Simple guitar effects circuits you can build. By Charles Platt

STOMP BOX 1.0: Harry DeArmond’s electromechanical tremolo generator, well over 50 years old.

Back in the day when guitar players marched around in frilly white shirts and high-heeled boots while strumming flamenco riffs, Harry DeArmond changed the path of popular music. He marketed the first successful electric pickup, so that guitar sounds could be piped through an amplifier.

Ten years later, as if amplification weren’t radical handle on top (above). Still, it was the world’s first enough, DeArmond jump-started the concept of guitar-sound hack, fetchingly titled the DeArmond sound mods by selling the first stomp box. Actually Trem Trol. As its name implied, it created tremolo. you couldn’t stomp it, the way today’s guitarists Anyone with a strong wrist can produce tremolo use toe-operated switches to activate fuzz, sustain, manually by turning a volume control up and down flangers, and such. It looked more like an antique 6 or 7 times a second. In other words, tremolo portable radio, with two dials on the front and a carry modulates the amplitude of the signal. This can be

Photograph by Dan Formosa

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