Portamento it is, not glissando, but no worries.

A pedal JUST for this doesn’t exist as far as I know, but you could probably put money on the EHX lab having something like this in the pipeline. It’s right up their street.

The V256 will get you the sound, but glide isn’t it’s only function, and the price-tag reflects as-such. Still not even half as expensive as the following however;

Pogtronix Mothership; it is very cool, but it doesn’t do much which you couldn’t get from buying several (far far faaaaaar) cheaper pedals, other than the glide obviously, but the Ring Thing can do all the ‘intelligent ring modulator’ and whammy sounds (plus a gazillion extras), the Octave Multiplexer will get you the sub octave (again, with extras) and you can build your own square wave/sawtooth generator with mix control for about £20. I’m not saying it’s a crap product but it’s totally not worth £350.

Hope this helps

I think you’re making a mistaken assumption about what is going on in the Mothership ($475). The oscillator is *not* just some sort of signal shaping/distortion like on the Microsynth (which can sound good, don’t get me wrong); it is an actual oscillator triggered by the input signal, and which can be set to any pitch relationship with the original input.

I own quite a few synth pedals, not just the Mothership, and there is a huge difference between those utilizing distorted and cut-down waves and those triggering an oscillator. I have never seen a DIY pedal for £20 which comes close to sounding the same. For that matter, I’ve even never seen a DIY of the SYB-3, which at this point is one of the most inexpensive true oscillator synth pedals on the secondhand market, and the SYB-5 and Behringer BSY600 are even further beyond the mad haxor skillz of the vast majority of DIY pedal builders.

There are many pedals which claim to generate “synth” sounds, and most are just fuzz/distortion of various types. Although I’m open to considering any schematics, I seriously doubt that any £20 DIY pedal link you care to post will be anything but more of the same.

Of course, for some, that level is enough, and if someone can’t hear the difference between a true synthesizer and fuzz/distortion, then yes, spending money on a real synth is “totally not worth it.”

Yeah, the oscillator’s more than a tuneable drone.

Musically, the ring thing can do quite a bit of the same things the Mothership can, but not really tonally. It can do harmonies, whammies, and sub octaves, but not with a fat synth tone. And while you can have the oscillator track your notes, I don’t think it will do tracking ring modulation (although if you had two ring things with one set to harmony and sent that into the carrier in of the 2nd ring thing, then yes you could)

Here’s a video of the Mothership: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faJq4BLI4_8

As far as DIY solutions, someone made a tuner with an arduino (a 20 dollar programming board that you can mount inside projects) that has a midi out that can track your pitch. Some modification of his code plus building a ring mod and an oscillator could produce a DIY version of a Mothership.

Back to portamento though. . . nothing will ever be as good as the real things. Even on synthesizers, it’s better to have a ribbon controller or an ondes martenot type controller to create portamento effects because otherwise the portamento has to be timed, which is never quite right.

A triggered oscillator could easily be built.

But a tracking oscillator would be a bit harder, because you’d have to have a note detection circuit.