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[John Davis/Nerve inside] Squarewave Synth & Detune/Pitch ??

M

manfred741

May 14, 2009
6
0
#1
Hello there !

I was looking at this video( 6:25)
( I can not post links right now as I'm too new on the forum; but you can find it on youtube " textural technique part 1and the song is derbyshire from EP2 !)



There are two points that I can not figure out :

-How did he manage to get this kind of "2nd synth voice" over the regular oc2 "-1oct" sound ? Is it an harmonizer ? Or is it just the bugcrusher through the mp201 ?
I guess the M9 is for delay + detune on this track ?

- Around 8:00; I think I can hear a squarewave synth; is it correct ?
I'm still asking myself what pedal was it ; maybe the IE prototype I've heard about ! ( and If anyone got some info about this prototype, i'm interested ;D I've read from John it was a weird synth pedal thing; maybe it was a prototype of the IE SubT ?)

If anyone can help me to resolve this "mystery"...
Thanks !
(And pardon my poor english; I'm French :D)
 
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#2
manfred741 said:
- Around 8:00; I think I can hear a squarewave synth; is it correct ?
I'm still asking myself what pedal was it ; maybe the IE prototype I've heard about ! ( and If anyone got some info about this prototype, i'm interested ;D I've read from John it was a weird synth pedal thing; maybe it was a prototype of the IE SubT ?)
Click to expand...

Even I don't remember much about that, but I can say it was not related to the Subterranea. The pedal I made for John had two separate modes. One would put out a square wave of your signal which could be unison or binary divisions (from 1 to ~10 octaves down, expression control for the divisions. The other mode came from a programming accident; I was trying to make something fairly normal I think, but I took a wrong turn somewhere in the DSP code and something totally weird and indescribable came out. Kind of like a circuit-bent Speak N Spell controlled (vaguely) by your bass. I would call it an experiment more than a prototype since I never really thought about making more. It could be interesting some day to make an "anthology of discarded algorithms" pedal, with all the ideas that in the past I decided were too esoteric. ;)

Sorry I can't answer your main question as I don't know about what gear John uses in general, or if any of the sounds we hear came from that pedal.
 
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#3
Hey; thanks for your reply Taylor!
Funny story indeed haha!
I got a question about the squarewave part of the pedal: I guess it's not really different from the SubT octo & unisynth squarewave ( except the SubT can do more things beside that) ?
 
#4
Well, the Subterranea is all analog, whereas the other pedal is digital. So in terms of what's going on inside they are not related, totally different circuits/techniques. Neither approach is necessarily better IMO - expression control of division ratios would be difficult to implement with analog logic (I now remember that they were integer divisors from 1 to 10, not octaves), but in this particular case I thought the analog circuit that became the Sub just sounded better for what I was going for, whereas not many bassists need to divide their pitch by 7.
 
#7
It was actually dividing by integers from 1 to 10, I remembered in the second post above. Divide by 10 is a little more than three octaves. It could do 10 octaves down easily but since that would be below audible for most bass or guitar inputs, that type of process is only useful for making a modulation source that tracks input pitch.
 
#9
I love that crazy pitch shift pedal Taylor! The Square Wave synth side of it is the pass sound on Fauxtek and a few other tracks. Manfred, you are correct on the signal chain. I think the actual shift amt is 23.6, so it's technically microtonal (or just out of tune depending on your perspective.. haha) an octave and a sharp major 7th above the fundamental. I also have some pitch vibrato on it.

John
 
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