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Joyo California & American: knobs up = theramin/constant high pitched tone

HeavyGroove

HeavyGroove

Mar 18, 2006
739
601
#1
Hello,

I picked up both the Joyo California & American pedals in an attempt to have one of them be my "clean amp" tone while using the EHX Tri Parallel Mixer. The American came in the mail first and I didn't find anything out of the originally. When the California showed up I wanted to check out the high voice and drive tone as that's what it did better than the American.

With both the voice and drive dimed, I got some sputtering background noise (like vehicle exhaust pipe sound) which I figured could just be the cheap pedal being driven hard. Next I went to turn up the mids and bam, constant high/mid pitched tone. I could move the mid knob back and forth to essentially produce a synth/theremin effect. Same with the master volume knob. If I back the knobs off and don't go over 8/10 levels, I can prevent the noise from happening.

I can coax this out of the American as well when its plugged into the Tri Mixer and the send and receive levels are dimed for that channel. Same thing though, stick to 8/10 levels and no theremin tone produced. For the California, if I nothing plugged into it I can always get it to start up by diming the voice and drive and increasing the mids to about 3 o' clock.

So, any Joyo American/California owners experience this as well or willing to test? I assume the high pitched tone is just the circuit being pushed past its limits, but if I keep it at 8/10 and lower levels will it work fine or is that a sign of imminent failure? The California might go back either way b/c I have to limit it even more when plugging it into the Tri Mixer but I might just exchange it for a replacement depending on you replies.

Thanks!
 
#3
Pulverizor said:
Running 9Volts only? Isolated? Tried batteries?
Must be a hot as fudge input signal.
Click to expand...

I'm running it off of my MXR DC Brick with a solo 9V lead. I also tried outlets on both floors of my house just to check the power. I didn't try batteries yet, but if that's the answer eventually I'll wind up spending more on batteries than the pedal costs, lol.

That's the thing, though I can replicate it on the California with nothing plugged into the input jack and just diming the knobs as described above. The pedals sound fine until that point.
 
#5
HeavyGroove said:
I'm running it off of my MXR DC Brick with a solo 9V lead. I also tried outlets on both floors of my house just to check the power. I didn't try batteries yet, but if that's the answer eventually I'll wind up spending more on batteries than the pedal costs, lol.

That's the thing, though I can replicate it on the California with nothing plugged into the input jack and just diming the knobs as described above. The pedals sound fine until that point.
Click to expand...
The MXR DC Brick is not isolated. There could be something happening with the power, especially if the EHX is on the same brick. I would be running power experiments/troubleshooting.
 
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#6
jbybj said:
The MXR DC Brick is not isolated. There could be something happening with the power, especially if the EHX is on the same brick. I would be running power experiments/troubleshooting.
Click to expand...

I'll dig out some wall-warts and see what happens.

EDIT: I meant to mention that this happened without using the EHX Tri Mixer as well, easily for the California at least.
 
Last edited:
#8
So after some additional testing, my prognosis is that these pedals are whack, man.

I used a Tech 21 9v wall-wort for my testing and the first weirdness happened there. The pedal would not turn on unless I had a cable in both the input and output jacks. That said, it WOULD turn on with just one cable plugged in if I was using a MXR brick lead. I know that this is a feature to prevent battery drain but it shouldn't work two different ways.

Even with using the wall-wort, I still had the same problems as before, so I did some additional testing just to find more info. With some of the knobs turned up to high levels, if I rolled the volume off on my pickups it introduced more noise than when my pickups were full open. Again weird.

The other issue I found was that if I was using a MXR brick lead, turned a pedal off, had some of the knobs dimed, unplugged the input cable and turned it back on, I would get a high pitched noise as well. So after all of that, its highly unlikely that I'm the only person diming the knobs on these things when them get them, so I'm going to say that I was unlucky and got two bad units.

I will say, though that when they were operating with more conservative knob twisting, that did a produce some pretty great tones. If they worked, I would have kept the California for my brighter basses and the American for my darker basses to balance them out/compliment them. Oh, well, back they go for a refund!
 

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