Another DIY build! God’s Box Loose Fruit dual wave shaper and crossfader. Loose fruit is digitally controlled with a fully analog signal path. It features two separate and similar wave shapers, plus a voltage-controlled crossfader that can be independently used. These shapers are not the typical wave folder type. Nine different “states” or shapes are smoothly morphed across by a panel knob, as well as under voltage control. A multi-color LED on each shaper indicates the current state. The left shaper features a suboctave switch, while the right one features a variable threshold (with CV).
The DIY build
The kit I bought from Thonk is a 2021 version with all SMD parts pre-soldered. All you need to do is solder the eurorack power header and all the panel parts (pots, jacks, switches, and LEDs).
You can see a couple of SMD capacitors weirdly placed. One of them is slanted. I took solace from seeing these exactly the same in the build document.
The most fraught part of the build was the 4-pin LEDs. The pins are so close together that if you’re not extremely careful, a solder bridge can occur between pins. This happened on one of the LEDs. It was a hair-pulling exercise to remove the bridge. A lot of flux and desoldering braid later, I got it fixed.
The toggle switch needs a nut on the back side of the panel at just the right position to line up with the tops of the jacks and pots. This took a bit of fiddling. I like to snug all the switch, pot and jack nuts before soldering, so that nothing gets strained. Normally, this is the final step. But this module has an additional empty board to cover the back and protect the circuitry. So after soldering, the panel has to be removed once again in order to attach the stand-offs for it.
A quick tone demo recording
The recording takes the same sine wave input to both shapers (input one is normalled to input two). It starts with the first shape state of the left shaper. I manually go up and back through the nine states. Then the suboctave switch is flipped and the nine states repeat. After a short silence, the same sweep is heard from the right shaper output, followed by turning up the threshold pot and repeating. There is a bit of a glitchy sound part way through the high threshold recording. That’s only because I turned the threshold up just a tad too high. Turning it all the way up becomes very glitchy.
This is only the most basic tone demo. This shaper even works with square waves! Be sure to watch the DivKid videos. Here’s the one that got me interested in Loose Fruit.
