Pluk 01

Description

1. What is it?
   Hand-built in limited quantity, “boutique” device called- “Pluk”, version 01
   It is a passive saturator in a single TRS female jack.
   It will change the harmonic content of your sound and can be also called exciter or distortion.
   
   Passive – a self contained with no need of external power supply in order to operate. 
   Pluk is dependent on the source devices that are connected to it to put it in the “right spot” and to regulate its sonic character.
   To achieve the effect you would need a good line level signal (recommendation is a minimum 2V Vmax)
   Limiter/Saturator – it will reduce the amplitude of your signal dynamically and will gradually saturate, introducing harmonics in relation to the amplitude and frequency of the incoming signal.
   Pluk will catch transients/peaks with the natural sounding time constant of the LEDs and go into soft clipping/saturation which is especially useful to achieve some glue on your drum bus and a few db of rms into your next stage.Creative usage can include running it in parallel to a dry DAW signal and blend-in some harmonics – Experiment with an EQ infront in order to shape your tone.
   Additional bonus points if you put run it only on your side signal.
2. Why?
   Sometimes simple is better!
   I have been on the constant search for a harmonic exciter for my sound since I started producing electronic music in the mid-90s  – always checking the latest software plugin emulation or any analogue gadget I could get my hands on. Some of them offered better results but none were fitting my needs – guitar pedals were usually tuned towards a guitar tone, reducing either low end and/or peaking the midrange. On the other hand software by “nature” produces aliasing in the high end that algorithms try to fix with filtering, which would never feel natural to me. So I started looking into the devices I liked and trying to fix them for my needs. This included some famous guitar pedals but also software saturators/ emulations. Early prototypes were done in software that got close enough. Then I was trying to match its transfer function into hardware to overcome the above “limitations”. At the end of the day my experiments were focused mainly on listening and led me to more and more simpler designs tuned to a specific hardware, reducing the design to the minimum. Then came the idea for the TRS/insert form-factor.
   A couple of different designs were born through the last five years that were built and shared with geeky friends and top-shelf producers. They all got excellent feedback and generated enough interest to motivate me to offer it publicly – so here we are!
3. Usage
   The device is a TRS female jack. Internally it is connected like an insert/send-return device. Which means it accepts a TRS (stereo) male cable with Tip (left) feeding line level signal and Ring (Right) outputting the processed signal. The usage scenario for Version 01 was in focus on drum machines, namely the Roland TR 8 and Roland TR 909, others options were also fun and sounded great, but I will leave that to you to experiment.
   When you plug a device using the below connection examples you can regulate the amount of the effect of the device produces by manipulating the output volume control of your source device (drum machine, sound card).
4. Connections:
   1. Option one is using a prebuilt Y Cable (send/return cable)
      Below is a diagram:
      Suitable cables you can find only or your local guitar shops are:
      – “Y cable”, “Send/Return” cable (like these examples: https://www.thomann.de/gr/pro_snake_tpy_2015_jpp.htm)
      – “mini-jack to stereo RCA” with suitable “minijack to stereo jack” (headphones) adapter connected to Pluk
   2. Second approach for connection is to use an insert point in your mixer (if available).
      The connection is by using a single TRS-TRS male (stereo, balanced) cable – patch it in the insert of your mixer from one end and the Pluk on the other side.