Figured out what was "wrong" with my setup, but...

[Nyarlathotep]

... I'd love to know why it didn't work.

Just for some back-story, I decided to try out a mixer solution to try to get a great sound out of my wah. It ended up like this:

The 3 channals got mixed and I origanally outputed to my amp. It worked fine. Then, I used my Aphex Punch Factory (set up to "sim" my amp, which is another story alltogether), but the bass freqs all but dissapeared

Now, me being a stubborn dude, decided yesturday to try it out one last time. I hurriedly hooked everything up but decided to go with just the bass and bass->wah channels. I set up the wahs range, Q, and volume as I always have: max, 1/2 way, and max. I then set up the PDDI as the last time: lots of low-mids, and drive, with everything else sorta flat. As for the mixer, I set chans 1 & 2 to 50% and turned chan 3 "off". I just ran the mixer into the Aphex, turned everything on, and hit the lo-B.



IT WORKED! Though I had to really reduce the treb on the PDDI and raise the bass a little to make the sweep of the wah even in volume... BUT IT WORKED!!!!!

Now, what I'd love to know is why, when I mixed in some clean chanel (even just a little bit), the compressor (aphex) caused a cataustrophic loss of bass, yet when I ran it into my amp, it sounded fine.

Another weird thing is that according to the PF's display, when I had a clean channal, the setup barly had any signal. Yet when I ran w/o clean chan, I overloaded the PF (and had to reduce the PDDIs level!)

Now all I need is another PF, a tuner (either a TU-2 or strobostomp), a George L cable kit, and a board the size of my current one, and I'll have a great 2nd board w/ wah!

(sorry for the long post!)

 

[bongomania]

Shot in the dark here, as I don't have the same components to compare, but doesn't the Aphex work its magic through phase realignment, especially of the low frequencies? If so, and if you mixed the clean channel in with it, you probably had some phase cancellation. I know, I beat that horse pretty often, but it seems plausible here. Especially if it sounded fine when the Aphex was last in the chain before the amp.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Shot in the dark here, as I don't have the same components to compare, but doesn't the Aphex work its magic through phase realignment, especially of the low frequencies? If so, and if you mixed the clean channel in with it, you probably had some phase cancellation. I know, I beat that horse pretty often, but it seems plausible here. Especially if it sounded fine when the Aphex was last in the chain before the amp.

I really don't know how the ahpex really works. I'm the kinda guy that if it works, don't fix it! Though, I had the same thought about phase cancellation. The one thing I love about the PDDI is that it keeps the low end no matter how driven it is, and with the clean channal it makes sense that phase would be an issue. My wah on the other hand loses all the bass anyway so combining that wouldn't (and is't) a problem. The strange thing is that it worked into my amp, though if the aphex does work as you've said then that would make sense to.

Ah, like I said, it works now, so I'm not gonna "fix" it!
It sounds great too!
A very strange experiment though...