Future Impact now available!! WAS: deep impact reissue!!! interested?

[Randy Ward]

Will the knobs be any wobblier?

Just give it time. Mine are wobblier now than when I first got it.

 

[Quatschmacher]

Great deal here:

Future Impact v3 Bundle — MIDI products by pandaMidi

 

[Quatschmacher]

Great deal here:View attachment 5008686



Future Impact v3 Bundle — MIDI products by pandaMidi

 

[Quatschmacher]

Apologies for the double post. Something weird going on today.

 

[thumbslapper]

Can the next FI could do MIDI out of incoming pitch? I have the Unisyn, and it works really well to play external synths (I use a Minitaur) using a mono input - tracks bends, tracks down to low B, is very playable - a feature like that would be amazing.

Otherwise what other folks are saying:
- usbc for configuration and MIDI sync (audio would be great here, but might be a big much of an ask)
- external footswitch & expression pedal in
- onboard editing
- smaller size
- CV out would be great as well - the Unisyn has this feature and it works great (I use a Arturia Minibrute2)

(I know i'm asking alot here!)

 

[Quatschmacher]

Can the next FI could do MIDI out of incoming pitch? I have the Unisyn, and it works really well to play external synths (I use a Minitaur) using a mono input - tracks bends, tracks down to low B, is very playable - a feature like that would be amazing.

Otherwise what other folks are saying:
- usbc for configuration and MIDI sync (audio would be great here, but might be a big much of an ask)
- external footswitch & expression pedal in
- onboard editing
- smaller size
- CV out would be great as well - the Unisyn has this feature and it works great (I use a Arturia Minibrute2)

(I know i'm asking alot here!)

The MIDI output thing is something that’s been suggested and discussed.

 

[Al Krow]

@Andras Szalay I’ve already suggested this but worth repeating:

would be good to be able to switch off the option which sends out the previously-detected note before the new pitch has been detected. It’s very useful for lots of uses but it would be good to be able to disable/set it on a per patch basis. Would also be good to have this accessible via the top panel and via dedicated MIDI command so that behaviour can be set quickly according to the user’s immediate needs.

@Andras Szalay this is such a good suggestion by Peter! I've now had 4(!) attempts at owing an FI, so it's not like I've not wanted to love this pedal, but the glitchiness I've found in live use has rendered it unusable in a band mix, which is such a shame. Just came across a live recording of my band which reminded me of this issue. It sounded great until I kicked the FI in and it was then all over the shop when playing octave style patterns on Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics. (I'd be happy to share with you to illustrate).

If Peter's suggestion can deal with the glitchiness and we can have a better visual display, so we can name rather than simply number patches, I'll happily give this otherwise fabulous unit another try.

 

[sunbeast]

@Andras Szalay this is such a good suggestion by Peter! I've now had 4(!) attempts at owing an FI, so it's not like I've not wanted to love this pedal, but the glitchiness I've found in live use has rendered it unusable in a band mix, which is such a shame. Just came across a live recording of my band which reminded me of this issue. It sounded great until I kicked the FI in and it was then all over the shop when playing octave style patterns on Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics. (I'd be happy to share with you to illustrate).

If Peter's suggestion can deal with the glitchiness and we can have a better visual display, so we can name rather than simply number patches, I'll happily give this otherwise fabulous unit another try.

I don’t think what he was suggesting would change the tracking you are talking about. The FI holds on to the previous pitch but sends a new note “attack” message immediately following your note attack then updates the new pitch when it is detected. This means the attack of the synth notes can follow your playing quicker than most pitch-tracking pedals, since most pedals only send the new attack at the same time as the new pitch is calculated (leaving latency in the actual note attack that is very noticeable to me in pedals like the C4 when playing in the low register). This all happens in milliseconds, so the pitch latency is probably imperceptible to most people (you can see it in a DAW if you zoom in) while attack latency is more obvious (the reason most pitch to MIDI devices are worthless to me for bass for example).

I think you are talking about general pitch-tracking glitchiness, and you may be able to improve this by experimenting with the “Note On Value” (I turn mine up and play hard to improve my tracking) and Input Gain, but also just your playing technique and pickup settings as well as muting techniques. I find the Future Impact can track quite fast if I play with a pick and palm-mute the strings to minimize dud notes being triggered, cleaner and faster for me than the C4. If playing finger style I find I need to be very careful about left hand muting to avoid interference (or play thumb style so I can still palm-mute)- probably a mechanical string mute at the bridge would be a big help to cut down on ringing harmonics and other potential interferences from the strings for those who don’t want to play with a pick.

I think most of these types of pedals have particular issues tracking octave jumps, as you have to be very careful to mute the previous note before triggering the new one or the pitch detection may not register the pitch change at all.

 

[Gsnorgathon]

Words of wisdom. One of the often frustrating things about synth pedals is that bass + synth pedal is a different instrument than bass, and requires learning new techniques appropriate to the new instrument if you want satisfying results.

 

[sunbeast]

Words of wisdom. One of the often frustrating things about synth pedals is that bass + synth pedal is a different instrument than bass, and requires learning new techniques appropriate to the new instrument if you want satisfying results.

Indeed- playing with a lot of right-hand dynamics like you would with a typical bass line will tend to make a frustrating mess out of a monophonic pitch-tracking synth. You really have to compress those dynamics into a smaller range and over-emphasize mutes/rests to ensure clean tracking. Thankfully the Future Impact does allow you to adjust note on and note off values to accommodate some of this for different playing styles and input signals, but even so it requires careful adaptation IME.

 

[Al Krow]

I don’t think what he was suggesting would change the tracking you are talking about. The FI holds on to the previous pitch but sends a new note “attack” message immediately following your note attack then updates the new pitch when it is detected. This means the attack of the synth notes can follow your playing quicker than most pitch-tracking pedals, since most pedals only send the new attack at the same time as the new pitch is calculated (leaving latency in the actual note attack that is very noticeable to me in pedals like the C4 when playing in the low register). This all happens in milliseconds, so the pitch latency is probably imperceptible to most people (you can see it in a DAW if you zoom in) while attack latency is more obvious (the reason most pitch to MIDI devices are worthless to me for bass for example).

I think you are talking about general pitch-tracking glitchiness, and you may be able to improve this by experimenting with the “Note On Value” (I turn mine up and play hard to improve my tracking) and Input Gain, but also just your playing technique and pickup settings as well as muting techniques. I find the Future Impact can track quite fast if I play with a pick and palm-mute the strings to minimize dud notes being triggered, cleaner and faster for me than the C4. If playing finger style I find I need to be very careful about left hand muting to avoid interference (or play thumb style so I can still palm-mute)- probably a mechanical string mute at the bridge would be a big help to cut down on ringing harmonics and other potential interferences from the strings for those who don’t want to play with a pick.

I think most of these types of pedals have particular issues tracking octave jumps, as you have to be very careful to mute the previous note before triggering the new one or the pitch detection may not register the pitch change at all.

That's a great post thank you! Trouble is I've got enough going on in a 2 hour live set without worrying about changing my playing style to suit a pedal. I'd rather adopt the right playing style for the song, if you get my drift? I find the tracking on the Boss SY-200 superb / glitch free and I guess I'll need to stick to that whilst conceding that in synth tone terms the FI is king. Probably boils down to the difference between polyphonic and monophonic tracking.

 

[sunbeast]

That's a great post thank you! Trouble is I've got enough going on in a 2 hour live set without worrying about changing my playing style to suit a pedal. I'd rather adopt the right playing style for the song, if you get my drift? I find the tracking on the Boss SY-200 superb / glitch free and I guess I'll need to stick to that whilst conceding that in synth tone terms the FI is king. Probably boils down to the difference between polyphonic and monophonic tracking.

The Boss SY pedals use the actual sound from your strings as the “oscillator” and just manipulate that sound using preset EQ and dynamic effects (to emulate the sound of saw/square/sine/etc waves) then run them into effectors (filters, etc). This means the SY pedals don’t actually need to track your pitch and trigger some internal oscillator sound which eliminates mistriggering that pitch-tracking pedals suffer from. The SY pedals do try to separate the different strings to manipulate them independently, which creates its own kind of tracking glitchiness (including affecting the attack of the sounds and some mistaken note separations).

The Future Impact is using your input source and just turning it into a handful of messages (note start, note stop, pitch, dynamics, etc) to trigger internally synthesized sounds completely independent from your input bass tone.

So the SY sounds aren’t using real sine/square/triangle wave sources and also are stuck following the envelope of your input signal (though you CAN program a delayed attack, you can’t change the sustain and other parameters) while the FI is using actual subtractive synth waveforms as its sound source and can trigger fully independent envelopes that don’t just follow the dynamics of your playing.

I have a Boss SY-1000 with instruments setup with 13-pin pickups (separate pickups per string), and it allows both “Dynamic Synth” tones (what the SY-200 uses, synth tones molded from manipulating your input signal) as well as triggered oscillator tones (like the Future Impact uses). The Osc tones in the SY have noticeably worse latency and than the Future Impact due to way the Future Impact immediately responds to attack (though the OSC tones do track a bit better in some ways due to separate tracking engine per string), while the Dynamic Synth sounds are immediate but noticeably thinner/less rich but with no tracking glitches whatsoever (because the SY1000 uses independent inputs AND synth engines per string it doesn’t have any of the artifacts of the polyphonic algorithm used in the SY-200 to separate the strings after the fact). I find the best sounds are made blending the two types of SY synths to get the depth of the OSC synths combined with the immediacy and perfect tracking of the Dynamic Synths.

I tend to agree with you that the solid tracking of the SY series makes it an obvious choice if you aren’t willing to invest time into adjusting technique to perfect pitch-tracking algorithms.

 

[acid bass]

That's a great post thank you! Trouble is I've got enough going on in a 2 hour live set without worrying about changing my playing style to suit a pedal. I'd rather adopt the right playing style for the song, if you get my drift? I find the tracking on the Boss SY-200 superb / glitch free and I guess I'll need to stick to that whilst conceding that in synth tone terms the FI is king. Probably boils down to the difference between polyphonic and monophonic tracking.

I've had my eye on the SY-200 for quite some time because of the polyphonic vs monophonic nature. But there to this day is only one demo of this pedal with a bass so I'm on the fence. It sounds like you're saying it's a bit easier to work with the SY-200 but the synth tones aren't as good as the FI? Do I have that correct?

For the record, I've gotten the FI to work really nicely in live settings, but I did have to really tweak the parameters a lot and still sometimes find it unsatisfactory on certain nights. I'm also a degenerate so I'm always looking at new synth pedals.

 

[sunbeast]

I've had my eye on the SY-200 for quite some time because of the polyphonic vs monophonic nature. But there to this day is only one demo of this pedal with a bass so I'm on the fence. It sounds like you're saying it's a bit easier to work with the SY-200 but the synth tones aren't as good as the FI? Do I have that correct?

For the record, I've gotten the FI to work really nicely in live settings, but I did have to really tweak the parameters a lot and still sometimes find it unsatisfactory on certain nights. I'm also a degenerate so I'm always looking at new synth pedals.

If you missed it, read my post right above yours about the fundamental differences- the SY series is just manipulating the sound of your bass to make its sounds (presumably running your input tone through compression, distortion, notch filters, etc to simulate synth waveforms), so it is very different to the way the Future Impact works since the Future Impact is using information about your input (pitch, start, stop, some dynamics) to trigger actual synth waveforms created internally. So the SY pedals can track super fast and cleanly (no latency necessary since it isn't tracking the pitch to trigger sounds), but have inherently limited sound to build from, while the Future Impact is going to be far more prone to glitchy tracking and latency but has fairly unlimited voice capabilities available (not at all limited to what your inputed tone is, limited only to what was programmed into it). You also get to build sounds completely from scratch in the Future Impact (from waveforms to envelopes to filters with parameters for pretty much everything a keyboard synth might), while the SY-200 is much more limited in this regard.

I only have the SY-1000, but can get a general idea of the SY-200 from it by using the mono guitar input and using limited voices and none of the other effects/amps/etc. Doing this there is a bit of a softened note attack (my understanding is this is a result of the polyphonic tracking algorithm- the pedal is separating your notes to try to manipulate each independently which takes some time to figure out so the "realized" tone lags a bit) and some added dirtiness/glitchiness to the response (also presumably byproducts of the polyphonic algorithm vs the monophonic tracking the SY-1000 uses per string when using a 13-pin pickup). The bass synth sounds from the SY used this way have far less depth available than the Future Impact, and detuned/sub-octaved sounds are much more digital/hollow sounding.

Honestly I think for quick and dirty reliable synth tones, the SY series is probably going to work fine for most players- particularly if you are willing to use some other pedals after it to thicken up the sound and aren't too worried about "nailing" any particular keyboard synth tones. The SY300 seems like a clearly superior alternative as far as programmability BTW, while the SY1000 is just killer but probably not worth it unless you have 13-pin pickups on your instruments.

 

[Al Krow]

I've had my eye on the SY-200 for quite some time because of the polyphonic vs monophonic nature. But there to this day is only one demo of this pedal with a bass so I'm on the fence. It sounds like you're saying it's a bit easier to work with the SY-200 but the synth tones aren't as good as the FI? Do I have that correct?

For the record, I've gotten the FI to work really nicely in live settings, but I did have to really tweak the parameters a lot and still sometimes find it unsatisfactory on certain nights. I'm also a degenerate so I'm always looking at new synth pedals.

Without wishing to divert this thread unduly to Boss SY pedals, I actually did a factory reset earlier and auditioned all 128 preset patches on my SY 200 to remind myself. Found one [82 "Synth Feedbacker"] which is going to be perfectly adequate as a starting point to build on and use live.

But you have my position summarised very well though. FI wins on quality of synth tones, SY-200 wins on tracking and display UI, which makes editing on pedal, without recourse to a PC, significantly more straightforward. The lack of glitches on the SY 200 makes it a much better option for me personally for live use. But horses for courses.

 

[Al Krow]

Was reflecting on whether my comment about display UI and on pedal editing, above, was fair? Actually this side by side pic puts it much more eloquently than I ever could!

 

[Quatschmacher]

Was reflecting on whether my comment about display UI and on pedal editing, above, was fair? Actually this side by side pic puts it much more eloquently than I ever could!

View attachment 5011349

Display cannot be changed in this upcoming revision. As mentioned it is a move that has been forced upon them due to a component being discontinued. The redesign needs to be done quickly to avoid having a gap in stock levels, so a ground-up redesign isn’t an option at this juncture.

 

[Al Krow]

Display cannot be changed in this upcoming revision. As mentioned it is a move that has been forced upon them due to a component being discontinued. The redesign needs to be done quickly to avoid having a gap in stock levels, so a ground-up redesign isn’t an option at this juncture.

Cheers Peter - that's understood. If the forthcoming "quick & dirty" update is the Mk4, then my personal take is there will be an awful lot of demand for a Mk5 incorporating your excellent suggestions you've shared with Andras. I'll check back in on this thread in 18 months

PS I'd really like to thank @sunbeast for his several excellent posts above - some of the most helpful I've come across in terms of clearly setting out some of the differences between the FI and Boss SY series. I recommend them to anyone thinking about which of these two leading synth pedals, taking quite different approaches, is going to be the more suitable for their own needs.

 

[bassbrad]

Was reflecting on whether my comment about display UI and on pedal editing, above, was fair? Actually this side by side pic puts it much more eloquently than I ever could!

View attachment 5011349

Display cannot be changed in this upcoming revision. As mentioned it is a move that has been forced upon them due to a component being discontinued. The redesign needs to be done quickly to avoid having a gap in stock levels, so a ground-up redesign isn’t an option at this juncture.

It should be worthy of consideration that Panda MIDI is a small company with a handful of highly knowledgeable and dedicated employees that have created and continued to develop a very unique product. BOSS/Roland is a major corporation with teams of engineers and employees my with decades of experience and much larger budget.
Also the products are vastly different in their capabilities and function.

 

[mactac]

Biggest improvement from a circuit point of view would be to add a class-compliant USB port (C or mini-B) to remove the need for an interface for updates and connection to the editor.

As for CV, if there is a way to direct the envelopes to the CV port so that they could be used to control the expression/CV input of an analogue filter pedal, this would be a HUGE improvement that would create something I’ve been asking pedal manufacturers to make for ages.

This would also strengthen the case for having amp envelope be made a Flexi mod source.


Would there be any scope to add more hardware knobs or more options to the existing parameter dial? (Could be done by having more “notches” on the dial, or by combing the dial with one or more button that switch what options the dial controls. Having top-level access to, say, the individual envelope stages would be most welcome for users that don’t use the editor.

There are quite a few fleshed-out ideas that I’ve already shared in our communal Trello board and via emails for improvements on the software side (such as my ideas for having access to all 128 values for the on-pedal parameter knob, increased oscillator resolution, etc) so would be good to revisit those.

Would phantom power on the MIDI port also be a possibility?

Any scope to have an on-pedal expression port? Perhaps integrating what you did with the 4Control into the pedal housing (could solve the USB thing too, but would need to be possible to do all updates without recourse to any external interface).

An OLED screen update showing patch names wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

Your request for a CV made me think of one of the biggest things that make bass pedals never actually sound just like synths: Pitch-tracked VCF. A CV out would do this (hooked up to a VCF), but could the pedal not just do that itself? A tracked filter would make a world of difference and take it to a whole other level.