Zoom Studio 1201 Circuitbent Stereo Multi-Effects Processor - SN 023890

Ready to ship in full working order following a full bending courtesy of Circuitbenders - info below from the Circuitbenders guide/site.

We advise using a 9v power supply that delivers 500ma (not included)- running at higher frequencies with the reclocking knob may draw more power than the standard supply can cope with.

The 1201 is one of those effects units that was slightly overlooked in its time and is somewhat underrated. A huge range of effects including reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, pitch shifting, LoFi, ring modulation, vocoder and vocal distortion – all with RAM-based variations via the character knob. It's already a lot of unit for the money, and the mods turn it into a monster sound mangler.

The Mods

First and most practically: a power switch - no more reaching around the back of a rack.

A 14-way RAM decimation switching matrix operates on any effect using the onboard RAM, which is most of them. Reverbs, delays, chorus, flanger, pitch shifting, LoFi, ring modulation, vocoder, vocal distortion, the lot. It produces what sounds like comb filtering, pseudo ring modulation, bit crushing, distortion, and what we can only describe as audio smearing™. Each switch has its own characteristic flavour, but those characteristics shift depending on which other switches are active simultaneously. Two or more switches must be engaged for anything to happen, and when they combine the results are genuinely unpredictable. Crucially, the dry signal passes through unaffected – it's the effect signal that gets mangled, so a delay setting will give you a clean dry signal alongside a delay that's been taken somewhere quite alarming.

One honest caveat: there's a degree of cyclical noise on certain effect and switching combinations, and things can escalate very quickly. With a little experience both are manageable. With no experience, expect occasional heart attacks.

A reclocking knob sets the system clock speed for the RAM and ADC/DAC converters. Delay times extend to a crunchy 15 seconds. Reverbs stretch from short metallic ambiences to vast disconnected washes. Pitch shifting and ring modulation frequency shift with it, and it does genuinely strange things to the vocoder and LoFi effects. Because it also controls the converter clock rate, it changes the incoming audio sample rate too – at higher than stock settings the audio quality actually improves on the original. A silver dot marks the standard operating frequency so you always know where home is.

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