In around 2006 we started offering the cease.transmission noise maker / oscillation device on our website. You put your finger on the touchpad and it outputs a tone. These were time consuming to make but we kept them on the website for almost 10 years because they filled a hole in our lineup of oddball noise devices. Now revisiting this circuit nearly 20 years later we have a much different pedal building landscape in terms of PCB and parts availability. The original device had no PCB and everything was wired point to point. The 2025 revision has a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the output jack and also a volume trimpot as well as a tiny power LED that you can peep through a small hole drilled in the side of the enclosure. Otherwise this is the same circuit two decades later and even uses the same batch of touchpads that we ordered back in the day.

These will be available in small batches and may not always be listed on our products page.

This tap tempo footswitch controller was designed to display the tempo that was most recently tapped. This project was a fun experiment into the Adafruit Trinket world but will not become a product that we sell. All credit for the code goes to Phillip Burgess and his project page can be found here if you’d like to build your own or get more information on how the circuit works.

Some interesting parts of this project include how to interface a tap tempo footswitch with another delay pedal. The problem being that some delay pedals will average together your inputs and other pedals will simply take the time between the last two inputs. The tempo displayed will be 100% correct to what was entered but your pedal may actually be at a different rate depending on how it interprets your inputs. Other considerations include how practical is this? At the end of the day it’s a fun toy, but I’m not sure if knowing the tempo is going to matter for most applications.

And some general tech specs: 125B enclosure, soft touch foot switch, 9V DC input at around 20-50mA of power usage, two ¼” jacks to control two delay pedals and the option to add as many outputs as needed. For any DIYers I strongly recommend going slow and hand filing the cutout for the screen as it was by far the most time consuming part of the project.

A bit about the design: The original footswitch uses intelligent switching meaning when you press A it goes to channel A regardless of what channel you were on. The same goes for channel B and channel C. This is done by using digital logic switching and is not simply a passive channel switcher that the majority of amps out there have used for decades. Passive switches like an ABC box usually give you A or (B or C) which means going from Channel B, to Channel A, to Channel C requires some premeditated stomping.

Here’s another Cease.transmission prototype this time without an LED to prolong battery life. Same internal circuitry as the original model just with the addition of a volume knob.

The latest addition to the deluxe prototype is the volume knob. There are two more prototypes planned until the actual retail model is released in a few months.

The cease.transmission was originally developed to be a quirky noise maker for studio and DJ use. Eventually guitar players started snatching them up but quickly found that since the original model doesn’t have an input jack that it is difficult to add to their pedalboards. This prototype was designed to fix that problem. The input and output jacks are setup in the same location as most standard guitar effects. They are wired in parallel yet will not load down your guitar signal. The LED is on when the effect is switched on and pulses with the lower frequencies generated. The toggle switch was chosen over a stompswitch because the device requires your hands to “play” the touchpad. The unit is still battery only, but draws no power when off and about 11mA when on (about the same as a Boss Chorus Pedal). As of this posting, the one pictured is available for $90 on the specials page. More may be available in the near future and may lead to a deluxe model.

In an effort to improve the 8-Bit fuzz (and possibly make it Bass guitar friendly) I started working on this prototype. The knobs are as follow: thickness selector, gain, input bias, – cut, + cut, feedback recovery, volume, and a focus switch. Expect to see add-on options for the 8-Bit Fuzz in the future. Controls to adjust the amount of glitch (sonic stability control) and to increase the sustain should be available soon.