Anyone looking to try a Chromatron or other 3leaf stuff I just posted in Hot Deals. Super deals thru Black Friday.
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3Leaf Audio Club - Episode 2
- Thread starter fivestringgecko
- Start date
went for the crazy black friday pricing on the chromatron...well a drunken blacked out version of myself went for it...and it arrived today!
I can post some clips, but didn't have much time to play with it...had a jam tonight after taking the kids to an evening school event and wasn't willing to hot swap it for my groove regulator before the jam. Got home a little bit ago and did the hot swap and plugged in a dunlop expression pedal to finally cure my speculation/curiosity. After a brief review of the manual I was able to dial in a fairly amazing tone almost immediately...took a few minutes, but I got my head around how the expression pedal works with the tone knob and found the sweet spot for me. While I will say that this does not intuitively wah wah like you'd hope, you can fairly easily and quickly find the best setting for your expression pedal and how you naturally move it for a wah. It takes some adjustment, but within a few minutes I had my voodoo chile kickin in and I gotta say that this pedal can DEFINITELY fill the shoes of a wah and...I can't call it an envelope filter since it is SO different from the groove regulator...variable state filter...and I think my groove regulator will be seeing the classifieds soon-ish (unless I lose my mind and start collecting pedals - though if there is ONE to save, it's that V1 groove regulator...mmm mmm mmm).
LT;DR - although the chromatron is not as natural of a wah out of the box as say the bass crybaby mini, you can fairly easily dial in an AMAZING wah sound for whatever expression you use and then get used to the full breadth of your expression's sweep and focus in the wah around where you naturally look for it.
I can post some clips, but didn't have much time to play with it...had a jam tonight after taking the kids to an evening school event and wasn't willing to hot swap it for my groove regulator before the jam. Got home a little bit ago and did the hot swap and plugged in a dunlop expression pedal to finally cure my speculation/curiosity. After a brief review of the manual I was able to dial in a fairly amazing tone almost immediately...took a few minutes, but I got my head around how the expression pedal works with the tone knob and found the sweet spot for me. While I will say that this does not intuitively wah wah like you'd hope, you can fairly easily and quickly find the best setting for your expression pedal and how you naturally move it for a wah. It takes some adjustment, but within a few minutes I had my voodoo chile kickin in and I gotta say that this pedal can DEFINITELY fill the shoes of a wah and...I can't call it an envelope filter since it is SO different from the groove regulator...variable state filter...and I think my groove regulator will be seeing the classifieds soon-ish (unless I lose my mind and start collecting pedals - though if there is ONE to save, it's that V1 groove regulator...mmm mmm mmm).
LT;DR - although the chromatron is not as natural of a wah out of the box as say the bass crybaby mini, you can fairly easily dial in an AMAZING wah sound for whatever expression you use and then get used to the full breadth of your expression's sweep and focus in the wah around where you naturally look for it.
some clips of what it sounds like with the expression pedal. I can post some better ones at some point, but wanted to get something up quick so ignore the playing and pjs
My go to for a pedal wah has been the Dunlop Cry Baby Mini Wah. But based on the above video I think I'll try it with my Dunlop mini volume/expression pedal.
I used this setup on my last gig and it works great.
I'd say it's worth a go...but it is not as natural as the Dunlop Baby Mini which is what I was going to go with until I heard 3Leaf had something new in the works. I'm glad I waited as I'd rather look to less pedals, but it does take a bit of tweaking to find the sweet spot for how your expression pedal reacts with the wah functionality along with how you use an expression pedal to get the wah sound. It gets better and easier the more I use it, but based on my current settings, I am not using the full breadth of my expression pedal to make the wah sing. I really have to listen with my ears as I work the foot...whereas, I found the Dunlop Cry Baby Mini to be built to how I naturally want to move a wah pedal to get the sound I want. With the 3leaf, the sound is there...it is just less intuitive (for me at least), but didn't require all that much effort to get it nice.
I remain impressed with Spencer's work so much so that it makes me G.A.S hard to collect everything he's done! Speaking of which, if anyone has one of those Enablers that they aren't leveraging...please hit me up, I'm really looking to change my setup to have my preamp/DI out on my board (so I don't have to lug around rack gear to sound decent) and I really want to give the Enabler a go. If you aren't looking to sell one, but are willing to loan it out, I'd also be interested in covering the shipping to check it out to see if it is worth the effort to hunt. That said, if anyone is local to Long Island, NY and has 3Leaf gear that isn't the groove regulator or chromatron, hit me up, I'd love to try the various flavors of protons and octavbres and anything 3leaf. You can obviously check out my gear and basses too...would be fun to do some side by sides with different versions.
@cosmicevan You've done us a great service here Thanks for the clips. I'm with you on the GR1, love mine! I was blessed to have Spencer mod mine with some of the features of the GR2 like the clean blend knob.
I hooked up my Dunlop mini expression pedal to my Chromatron to give it a try. My understanding from the Chromatron manual is that the expression pedal only manipulates the tone setting and that's what it sounded like it was doing. The Cry Baby is an expression controlable envelope filter, and more expressive. So I went back to that. Kind of disappointing. Maybe I was doing something wrong?
Read the manual. The expression controls the filter cutoff frequency. The tone knob controls the frequency when the expression is at toe down position. Instead of controlling filter with playing dynamics you can use your foot and set the range.
Read my post. I did read the manual, and asked if my "understanding" of it was correct.
I think it’s the same concept as any wah pedal. The pedal sweeps the frequency cutoff, which create the “wah” sound.
Right, but I am using this as a Dunlop "Cry Baby Mini Bass Wah" as an alternative to the Chromatron expression wah. According to Dunlop it "incorporates a proprietary potentiometer and custom EQ circuitry specifically optimized for bass frequencies." So I believe it is different than a traditional wah. Anyway, I like what it does more than using an expression pedal with the Chromatron. Here is the developer explaining that is basically an envelope filter in the form of an expression pedal.
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Sorry, didn't mean to sound snarky. It took a few tries for me to find the sweet spot for where I like the tone for ideal wah effect.
@Bassheart365 agreed expression on the chromatron does not compare to a dunlop mini crybaby.
For me, it does a solid job of meeting my wah needs (at least for now), but like I mentioned it took me some tweaking and getting used to how the expression pedal controls the sweep in the chromatron. I think the video clips do a decent job of showing where I was able to get it to without too much effort.
I've been wanting to add a dunlop mini crybaby, but if I can get away with adding some sort of splitter on my expression so I can use it for multiple pedals and not have to add something to get a wah, then I'm all about it.
For me, it does a solid job of meeting my wah needs (at least for now), but like I mentioned it took me some tweaking and getting used to how the expression pedal controls the sweep in the chromatron. I think the video clips do a decent job of showing where I was able to get it to without too much effort.
I've been wanting to add a dunlop mini crybaby, but if I can get away with adding some sort of splitter on my expression so I can use it for multiple pedals and not have to add something to get a wah, then I'm all about it.
Just got to trying out my Chromatron. The format and controls are basically the same as a Wonderlove dlx but I can see it’s a definite upgrade. Construction is even higher quality and it plays more musically. Kudos to Spencer for continually perfecting his craft!
Really digging the Chromatron with the Octabvre and Doom in its FX loop!!
- Apr 29, 2003
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- Disclosures
- Contributor- Bass Musician Magazine | Marketing Manager- Trickfish Amplification
Never knew about this new addition to Spencer's range, but have just watched the 20 min bass demo on the 3leaf website and God damnit, am probably gona have to buy one of these now!
