Blackstar
Distortion - Get high gain and huge tone from this box. Loads of sustain for blistering leads, and enough control to make any amp sound meaty and mean, yet harmonically rich and full.. For hard rock to metal and more.

What is the Blackstar?
The Blackstar is a high gain distortion pedal especially suited for hard rock and heavy metal playing. The Blackstar allows you to match the pedal to your guitar and amp... NOT the other way around. Most high gain pedals fall flat because of their frequency response, or because all the distortion is produced in one gain stage.

Frequency response problems can happen at the input or output of the effect. Too much bass response at the input can make the distortion muddy. Of course bass response is dependant on the guitar used, and most distortion pedals do not allow for tweaking pre-gain bass response. The lower drive knob is a bass frequency gain control and allows you to "match" the pedal to your guitar. Then there's the output. A lot of high gain pedals sound great at low volumes, but just don't cut through the mix at rehearsal or on stage. The Blackstars' tone control allows you to match the distortion to your amp, whether its a 1x10 combo, or a 4x12 stack.
The Blackstar produces its distortion through cascaded gain stages, much like a tube amp. Each stage is a little different. The first stage uses a mosfet. The two following stages use hand picked jfets. Jfets are known for producing even harmonics when overdriven, much like tubes in guitar amps.

Notes from the engineer:

Almost immediately after releasing the Liquid Sunshine, requests poured in for the same pedal but with more gain. After tinkering around I ended up moving on, and not giving it much thought for a while.

Then one day, while visiting Catalinbread in Seattle, The owner Nicholas Harris, and I decided to plug in some pedals. He had told me once before that his Super Chile Picoso booster pedals worked really well with Liquid Sunshine. We ended up plugging them in, and turning all the knobs up... There was a lot of palm muting, pinch harmonics, and eyebrow raising going on.

I thought to my self, instead of adding a cascade of similar stages to the Liquid Sunshine Design, perhaps just a big fat clean boost added to the circuit would work. I designed a circuit limiting my self to 3 knobs, and simply replaced the input buffer in the original design, with a simple clean boost circuit. Within a couple weeks, I had a working prototype. It was good, but it wasn't great. The original design, just didn't have quite enough gain. The drive knobs didn't interact in a complimentary way.

At this point, I decided this needed to be more than a simple afterthought of an existing design. It needed to be something that would stand on it's own. Instead of just pushing gain to the limits it needed to pushed over the top, and I knew it needed a really good tone control.

I ended up totally changing the way the drive knobs worked, and came up with a tone control design that complemented the effect.

Flying Tomato 2.0
Mutant Fuzz - Similar to many classic fuzz designs the Flying Tomato adds a number of modern improvements, and it doesn't stop at true bypass, and an LED. It also works with other pedals and active pickups. We also added Tone controls, and a bias control. This fuzz goes from hair raising, to classic, to gated.

What is the Flying Tomato?
The Flying Tomato is loosely based on the classic two transistor fuzz design, but with many modern improvements including, a switchable impedance matching input buffer, tone controls, bias control, true bypass switching, and an LED indicator.

The Flying Tomato input buffer allows it to work after virtually any pedal, or with active pickups.

One of the ideas we strive for here at Subdecay, is pedals you can "match" to your guitar and amp. Some fuzzes sound great with a combination of certain guitars and amplifiers, but sound awful with others. With the bias, and tone controls, you can dial in the sound you want, and still cut through the mix at your next gig.

Notes from the engineer:

Over the years I have built a number of fuzzes for my own personal use. Typically based on classic fuzz designs, a number of things always bugged me about them. Almost all of them had to be first in the signal chain, or they would sound awful, and they all were limited by the classic two knob design.

These characteristics were both products of my conventional thinking towards fuzz. I started to thinking "outside of the box. Sometimes this is hard when it comes to fuzz. Some might even consider it a sin to defy convention when it comes to such a topic.

If you are a "vintage tone purist" you probably want to stop reading right here (but wait you're almost done anyways.) While the Flying Tomato is loosely based on classic designs, it is not authentic to any original. Like most of the tomatoes you buy at the grocery store these days, this fuzz has been unnaturally redesigned.

Can be powered by a 9 volt battery or 9VDC adaptor with a negative center 2.1mm barrel style plug. Current draw is less than 10mA.

Liquid Sunshine
Class A Overdrive - JFET based design for natural breakup and huge available volume boost. The Liquid Sunshine will give your amp a good kick in the ass. Equally useful as a clean boost, treble booster, and overdrive. Responds well to boosters, and loves pushing your other dirt boxes too.

What is the Liquid Sunshine?

The Liquid sunshine is a Jfet based overdrive with graceful breakup and pick attack, and will not cover up the the natural sound of your guitar and amplifier.

With two drive knobs, the Liquid Sunshine allows you to control the character of the overdrive rather than simply controlling overall gain. The drive knobs controls two separate gain stages, each with their own characteristics. The top drive knob pushes the overall frequency range, while the bottom drive knob accentuates the middle and high frequencies. Both are very interactive, and allow the Liquid sunshine to perform as a clean boost or treble booster, as well as an overdrive.

Why doesn't the Liquid Sunshine have a "tone" knob?

Unlike a lot of other overdrives that use diodes to clip an amplified signal, the jfet circuitry produces no "sharp edges" or hard clipping. Many tone knobs on overdrives have a very narrow band of useful settings.

Instead, the bottom drive knob on the liquid sunshine controls gain and also alters the frequency response, with many useful settings over a wide range.

The Liquid Sunshine now has two internal controls for bass, and treble boost.

Notes from the engineer:

First lets start out with the definition of overdrive. What is an overdrive pedal supposed to do? It seems that if you ask 100 guitarists you could get 100 different answers.

My definition is: An effect that adds harmonic content, and volume to the guitar signal that must possess the following three characteristics.

Graceful breakup while preserving playing dynamics.
Pushes an amp in to overdrive without getting muddy.
Equally as useful with a clean or already overdriven amplifier.
There are many overdrives out there that possess one or two out of these three characteristics. Then there are others which define overdrive in a completely different way, by attempting to emulate vintage amplifiers, often with far more signal compression, obliterating the nuances of the notes originally played.

Can be powered by a 9 volt battery or 9VDC adaptor with a negative center 2.1mm barrel style plug. Current draw is less than 10mA.

Noise Box

The Noise Box is somewhere in between a chaotic octave generator, guitar synth, and a broken robot stuck in an angry bee hive.

The Noise Box is an envelope sensitive harmonic frequency generator. Frequencies generated are harmonically related to the input, and controlled by the Frequency knob, the Sense knob, and the chaos knob.

The Frequency knob sets the resting point of the frequency generator.

The Sense knob controls how much the input signal will affect the the range of the frequency generator.

The Chaos knob controls the attack. Once turned half way up the Chaos knob loses it's ability to track correctly, and the tones created by the frequency generator become more and more random.

The Voice control alternates between two different voicings of the frequency generator, with varied levels of filtering.

Level controls overall volume of the effect.

The Noise Box also has an internal noise gate built in that turns the frequency generator off when you are not playing.

Quasar- NOW WITH VOLUME CONTROL
A four stage phaser offering ultimate control and loads of headroom. Feedback, Frequency, Depth, Mix, and a rate control that goes from super slow to way too fast, allows the quasar to produce an infinite number of sounds.

What is the Quasar?

The Quasar is a vactrol based phase shifter that does everything from rotating speaker sounds, to bouncy odd ball filter effects. All knobs are very active in altering the effect, and it will not add noise to your signal like a lot of jfet based phasers.

There's a load of sounds packed in this box.

Rate control takes you from super slow to way too fast.
Feedback control radically alters the voice of the effect using both positive and negative feedback.
The frequency and mix knobs are somewhat interactive and have a huge range. Turn the frequency knob way down, and you will hear the LFO become non symmetrical, as it bounces against the lower end of the frequency range.
Mix control allows you to change the level of the overall effect versus the unaffected signal.
As of September 2007 all new Quasars have an internal volume trim pot.
Why its different?

The Quasar uses Vactrols to vary the phase shift frequency, instead of jfets, which most other phasers use. In a phaser circuit Jfets typically add a mild distortion to the guitar signal, which increase as the input to the effect increases. Vactrols are more expensive, but offer offer a cleaner audio path, a wider frequency range for the phaser effect, and far more headroom.

Simply put the Quasar offers great versatility, but still fits nicely on your pedalboard.

Notes from the engineer:

Most modulation effects, even the good ones, always seem to leave me wanting more. Over the years, I have owned a number of phasers, some of which sounded awesome, and others were just plain awful.

Even the good ones would get boring after a while, because of the limitations in their controls. Others which had offered great control over the effect, were either too "obvious" sounding, or lacked the proper headroom to stay clean when strumming an open chord. Then there's the studio gear, often integrated in to a large bulky rack mount unit that had to be run through a mixer or at line level, and far too expensive, and/or physically large to want to carry around on your pedal board.

When I started work on the Quasar, I wanted ultimate control, but also did not want to get stuck with knobs that barely did anything or only sounded good in one spot... That would simply be unacceptable.

For cleanest operation use with a fresh 9V alkaline battery or 9VDC adaptor with a negative center 2.1mm barrel style plug. Current draw is less than 30mA. One alkaline battery should last over thirty hours.

The all new Stupid Box 2.0
Distortion - The Stupid Box has been updated. The tiny circuit has grown, but the price hasn't. Now offering more versatility by adding 5 internal controls

What is the Stupid Box?

The Stupid Box is a medium gain distortion with Volume, Tone, and Drive external controls, as well as new internal controls: Pre-bass, Pre Treble, Bass, Mid-range, and a Smooth/Crunch switch. This allows the effect to be tweaked from a mild overdrive to a creamy fuzz.

The smooth/crunch switch alters the placement of clipping diodes in the circuit.

The external tone control is still the secret to the sound of this box. The Stupid Box uses a variable frequency filter. The tone knob sets the frequency where high end roll off occurs. Tech talk aside, this allows you to more accurately match the pedal to the voicing of your amp.

The internal mid-range and bass control allow you to even more accurately match the pedal to your amp, and the pre-bass and pre-treble controls allow you to match the pedal to your guitar. The pre-bass control is also especially helpful in getting rid of excessive low end often wont work well when running overdrives in to an already overdriven amp.

The original stupid box was designed for a big ballsy up front sound through a clean, loud, open back amplifier, but with the added modifications it works much better with closed back cabs, and can be set to sound great at practice volumes as well.

Notes from the engineer:

The Stupid box was the first pedal introduced by Subdecay Studios in 2003. I had been looking for something to get a big ballsy sound out of my amp, but my ultra clean 100 watt 6L6 based tube amp combo just did not seem to agree with anything I threw in front of it. Sustain, and good harmonic response were a must. After going through plenty of overdrives and distortions, and building a few 'clones', I finally decided to build my own.

I wanted something with a big low end, without getting muddy, and an in your face sound, without the high end sizzle I got with a lot of other pedals. After a few weeks of experimenting after band practice, I came up with the stupid box.

Can be powered by a 9 volt battery or 9VDC adaptor with a negative center 2.1mm barrel style plug. Current draw is less than 10mA.