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Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing thread
- Thread starter ttasselm
- Start date
The Zoia is slick, but yeah, it's more than I need with my H9 setup. I'd love it for the sequencer though.
I really like the red panda particle v1.
Best used at arms reach for live knob tweaking. I prefer the v1 to the v2 for it's "simplicity".
It really is an instrument more than a pedal imo.
Others here own the CT5, Tensor and the MOOD. Ill let them give you some info and feedback since I have never tried any of those myself.
The panel thing? My mind is jelly at this point...the past few days have done a number on my brain.
I adore the Tensor. It's become a big part of my playing. Never thought I'd be so enamored. I have many friends with the CT5. That'll be my next big pedal purchase. I feel like both of these pedals are more like playing with another musician. They can be quite unpredictable, and therefore you are forced to interact with them in the moment. I love that.
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Thanks. A professional musician friend of mine uses the particle (v1) a ton, so that's my kinda default option.
- Mar 8, 2011
- 12,232
- 51,187
- Disclosures
- Authorized greenboy designs builder/Owner of BNA Audio
Looks like a Moog Subharmonicon is headed my way 
Good choice.Looks like a Moog Subharmonicon is headed my way
I think my next little investment might be a pair of contact mics. The samples I can get with those paired with my portable 4 track can be very interesting.
Damn....even the contact mic straight into my SP could be freakn dope......(mad scientist laugh)
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I have a Montreal Assembly Count to 5 and a Chase Bliss MOOD. The latter seems to have no end to the entertainment it provides, and keeps revealing more and more fascinating capabilities the longer I use it. The former to be honest has pretty much defaulted to being my real-time reverse pedal exclusively ...I know it can do so much more, but A) a lot of the so much more that it can do I'm not finding particularly useful; and B) that real-time reverse stuff is so freakin' cool! They'll both do "granular/weird/glitchy" stuff 'til the cows come home, but if you were serious about the "pretty" stuff too I'd give the edge to MOOD.
I have no experience w/ the Red Panda line.
I would consider a long term investment for a MOOD but I use so many tools as input sources the need for impedance and level converters would be ridiculous.
Are you using impedance/level converters for all your other stompboxes? Or are you just not using any stompboxes these days?
Stompboxes only for instrument level signal sources.
For line level I use my Daw, SP or mixer at the moment.
With certain pedals I can "cheat" using a boss lmb-3 to adapt the signal levels. But dirt pedals are the worst, impossible to use with anything line level.
Imo I would need at least 4 reamp boxes minimum to go from line to instrument. Plus more adapters to for the opposite, line to instrument level. That's a total of 8 in/outs converters. This makes things wayyyyy too expensive and complicated.
oh lordy, yeah that's definitely too expensive and complicated! When I'm using stompboxes in the studio -- presuming I haven't already tracked through them -- I just keep a single reamp converter on one of the aux sends from the console and then run it through my entire pedalboard. If I need to treat different tracks with different signal paths I re-record them back into the DAW individually.
That is exactly what I plan to do with the mixer. Use the aux in/out with a reamp converter to allow many sound sources to be processed by the fx chain of stompboxes.
I have not used ableton for quite a long time for this signal processing type. It lacks the hands on hardware aspect. I could do some massive midi mapping to a controller......buy I tend to procrastinate stuff like that. It bores me to death. Personality flaw i guess.
Add to that many plugins controls can't be midi mapped.
I gotten pretty good with a mouse with my favorite ones though.....
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Yeah, our initial conversation has been branching out into other similar conversations. While I was chatting with Daniele about something else I realized it'd be cool to have a panel discussion...something I've been thinking about producing to go along with the webinar discussions I've been putting together. I'm having more and more discussions about what you and I had messaged about. It seems needed for us all to speak together, record it, and put it online. Maybe a larger, more open conversation can continue from there.
tl;dr
I really recommend the Tensor and Mood for looping, for general versatility, and for having no hidden or alt parameters. I love the Count to Five for being its own little weirdo (but don't like it much for looping). Particle v2 is a great pedal, but I personally don't like it as much as the others.
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Feels weird to say for some reason, but I have all of these. They're all pretty distinct in terms of how they feel and operate, though they definitely have overlap in terms of the sounds they can create. They all go from fairly to very deep, and all are rewarding.
Some thoughts/opinions while I'm groggy:
-I admire the Particle v2 more than I love it: it's incredibly cool, but I've never found it as immediately satisfying or quite to my taste as the others. The web editor helps quite a bit, and it's fairly amazing how much it can do, and the variance there between straightforward and downright weird. I find it does require a fair amount of memorization, as the controls react pretty differently in each mode. Does not have a looping function, but I think it could make for a good match if used with a conventional looper. The 4 on-board presets are a big help. But yeah: great pedal, not my favorite, though ymmv.
-I deeply love the Tensor, and it's on every board I've had since I got it. This one differs from the others in that it doesn't have roots in being a delay (though in certain settings it can kind of emulate one). There's just nothing else quite like it, and though there's a few days worth of learning curve, once you get it it's very easy to mess around with. It can get you to sound like a techno track melting in acid, or can be what gets you to sweet ambience. Great for both live manipulation and live-looping. It has preset/midi functionality, but when using it I don't find I need those so much. It is the purest in terms of being a glitchy pedal and not a granular one. I love it with an expression pedal. Yeah, it's one of my favorites.
-The Count to Five is a classic, and kind of the inciting pedal for popularizing quirky/glitchy/granular pedals. It's another one I love. However, it's notoriously a pedal that's difficult to feel like you have full control of or have mastered, and that's part of its appeal but can also be confusing or frustrating for people. It has a very pretty, very digital/artificial delay sound. It currently has two firmware options, and each of the firmwares have 3 modes (you can't mix and match), which vary in how intuitive they are. I personally find it not the easiest pedal to make loops with. Generally easy to get into, easy to have fun with, hard to control. No preset functionality (again, part of the frustration but also part of the appeal).
-The Mood clearly was made after a lot of the other glitch/granular pedals which paved the way, and learned from them. It's a bit as if someone combined aspects of the Tensor and the Ct5. This doesn't make it a better pedal than either of the others, and in some ways can make it feel like it has less of a strong personality than those (to me at least). But it's very deeply engineered, and very well put together, and its formatting and midi capabilities open it up in some incredible ways. Like the Particle, it can be used straightforwardly (the reverb and delay modes are rich, with the reverb being one of my favorites of any pedal I've played), but that would be kind of missing the point. Like Tensor, it has a micro-looper that's easy to mangle. The interactions between the two sides are fun and fascinating. The effects side gets the most use from me, since between the universal Clock and the dip switches, you can use it to emulate other effects, or to get some truly wild sounds. This pedal benefits the most for me from midi presets, though I used it for quite a while without them.
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some of my favorite videos delving into these pedals, since a lot of them benefit from demonstration over description:
Mood
Tensor:
Particle v2
(imo this is a must-watch if you get the Particle. this video helped me immeasurably in getting to grips with this pedal)
Red Panda Particle V1 vs. V2 || Demo/Comparison || NoiseGenerator (a comparison of Particle v1 and v2)
Count to Five
Count to Five rev k/l features
Montreal Assembly Count to 5 Nightly Firmware
Mood
Tensor:
Particle v2
(imo this is a must-watch if you get the Particle. this video helped me immeasurably in getting to grips with this pedal)
Red Panda Particle V1 vs. V2 || Demo/Comparison || NoiseGenerator (a comparison of Particle v1 and v2)
Count to Five
Count to Five rev k/l features
Montreal Assembly Count to 5 Nightly Firmware
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I'm thinking of selling off a bunch of pedals I'm not really using, and vaguely (along with like 5 other potential plans) using the money towards a Zoia
Ha! I recently wrote something fairly similar over on a GearSlutz thread about Favorite Reverb Pedals:
