My Dirt Bender - Another Jounal

[Charlie Tuna]

Looks like more analog pedals will be introduced over time:
"Killer code only sounds killer when it’s hosted inside of an ideal analog environment, and even though we’re primarily known for our DSP prowess, our stuff wouldn’t sound the way that it does without our strong analog team.

The analog guys are always coming up with interesting designs, so we’ve launched the ‘Series A’ line of pure analog pedals to give them an outlet, with Fairfax being the first in the line.

The designs you’ll be seeing in ‘Series A’ are intended to offer something different from traditional Strymon offerings, with no MIDI, USB, firmware or digital processing. These will be pedals that are unabashedly analog, which means it could get really interesting! Keep an eye out for more ‘Series A’ pedals as we go forward."

 

[Charlie Tuna]

In other non-dirt news, it looks like Behringer is releasing a clone of my favorite envelope filter…Lovetone Meatball

Sorry for the derailing, @el murdoque

 

[el murdoque]

Not a dirt pedal either, but NPD is NPD

 

[el murdoque]

In other non-dirt news, it looks like Behringer is releasing a clone of my favorite envelope filter…Lovetone Meatball

Sorry for the derailing, @el murdoque

About time they did it! Now that they finished the catalog of the big box Moog pedals, the other classics are up, it seems.

 

[warptheory]

Not a dirt pedal either, but NPD is NPD


View attachment 7386493

Make sure you try it with some fuzz before or after to get some good filter sweeps. Octave also sounds good going into a wah.

 

[el murdoque]

An observation:
Back in the day when Aguilar was still owned by Dave Boonshoft, I did have questions. I shot them an email, and a guy named Marco replied. Marco had all the Info I wanted, and gave me detailed info. All this happened on the same day, and the conversation was from bassist to bassist - on first name terms, all very friendly and familiar. When I had the info I wanted, I also got something extra:
The assurance that, should I run into future problems that need clarification from the manufacturer side, Marco got my back.

When I received the Tone Hammer pedal about three weeks ago, I had another question and wanted clarification from Aguilar, so I shot them a mail.
The reply was instant - but automated. Thank you for reaching out to the Korg customer service. We received your mail and will get back to you shortly.

About ten days later, I got another mail, but instead of an answer, it was another automated one, apologizing for taking so long and promising an answer in the near future. Well, more than a week has passed and I'm still waiting.

 

[el murdoque]

Make sure you try it with some fuzz before or after to get some good filter sweeps. Octave also sounds good going into a wah.

Yeah sure! I'll have to fire some treble content in there to create a prominent quack.
Or not - that will be determined shortly.

Does anyone know if these suffer from tone-suck in bypass mode? I know it's not true bypass.
If it goes to the intended purpose of replacing the expression pedal on my big board, then this won't matter since it'll sit in a loop of my Morningstar looper,
but I could also see myself using it on the metal board, since there is a lot more dirt going on, but on that board, there are no loopers, the signal travels all the pedals all the time.


I did try the emulation of that Wah on the Headrush, and there, it worked surprisingly well with a clean signal. The amount of quack was phenomenal and I heavily used it whenever the jams leaned towards the funky side of things.
Now I'm hoping that the real deal is at least as good as the digital recreation.

 

[warptheory]

Yeah sure! I'll have to fire some treble content in there to create a prominent quack.
Or not - that will be determined shortly.

Does anyone know if these suffer from tone-suck in bypass mode? I know it's not true bypass.
If it goes to the intended purpose of replacing the expression pedal on my big board, then this won't matter since it'll sit in a loop of my Morningstar looper,
but I could also see myself using it on the metal board, since there is a lot more dirt going on, but on that board, there are no loopers, the signal travels all the pedals all the time.


I did try the emulation of that Wah on the Headrush, and there, it worked surprisingly well with a clean signal. The amount of quack was phenomenal and I heavily used it whenever the jams leaned towards the funky side of things.
Now I'm hoping that the real deal is at least as good as the digital recreation.

I had the big version of it before and didn't notice any tone suck, but I also didn't A/B it. I have heard people say that though, so it might depend on the rig, or I'm just tone deaf and didn't realize it.

 

[jcburn]

Not a dirt pedal either, but NPD is NPD


View attachment 7386493

I've owned 2 of the big version. I didnt experience any tone suck bypassed, but both of mine developed a problem whereby the spring that pushes the pedal back to "bypass" would wear out over time. Meaning that when this happened, about 50% of the time releasing your foot from the pedal wouldn't disengage the envelope filter fully.
I did email Dunlop support and got a helpful response on fixing the issue, but I barely use the pedal these days and havent tried the fix yet.

Derail over.

 

[jcburn]

I like the overall effect by the way - nice sounding wah effect.

 

[projectapollo]

I searched this thread for the Greer Lightspeed and got no results. Any experience with it?
How about the Trickfish Overdrive?

 

[el murdoque]

I searched this thread for the Greer Lightspeed and got no results. Any experience with it?
How about the Trickfish Overdrive?

I never tried the Trickfish, because everything I ever played that was Trickfish gave me the impression that while I'm the big and round with a fat booty kind of sound enjoyer, they are in the crystal clear and as crisp as possible camp.


The Greer has managed to elude my attention successfully. I never even know it existed - looking into that now.

 

[Zbysek]

The Greer has managed to elude my attention successfully. I never even know it existed - looking into that now.

My understanding from talking to guitar players is that the Lightspeed is one of the "best" (I know it's subjective) overdrives out there...especially for country players.

There is very little info on how does it work with bass though.

I would be very interested to read your opinion on this one...

 

[el murdoque]

With the recent acquisition of two non-dirt pedals, my board has seen some changes.
The Horrothia, now that we had some more time getting acquainted to each other, has quickly managed to win me over. It's a one knob chorus, but that one knob is enough. I still have issues with the green LED because that really does not match the rest of the pedal's color scheme, but that's still a minor problem. The pedal is dead silent, and the chorus feels lush and right.

The Wah is, more or less a solution to a simple problem.
I used to have quite a number of pedals on my board that had MIDI control capacity. The Strymon BigSky and Mobius, the Hologram Microcosm (for a short while), the Zoia, the Source Audio C4.
The expression pedal was super nice to have for controlling several parameters in several scenes I made up, but in the current state of affairs, I only have the BigSky left as a Midi capable pedal, and I never used the expression pedal for any of the reverb functions, so I found myself with a pedal on my board that had nothing to control.
Furthermore, I found myself with a free slot on the looper, because the Prunes & Custard replaced two pedals (Doom2 and PX-101).
That free spot is, as luck will have it, in the exact place where I'd put a wah if I had one. After dirt, but before modulation.
So I dropped that in yesterday and played a bit. Through headphones, the effect was somewhat cool, but not as pronounced as I would have hoped, but I was home alone, so I routed the signal to the PA and played loud - and there it was. A very vocal quack, like a ventriloquist imitating a duck. Great!

I tried the wah with the Prunes & Custard and it's a lot of fun, too. There's some chaos going on when you have two audible filter sweeps, one envelope and one foot controlled.

The final confirmation was that when I thought about re-programming the Morningstar, I noticed that all I have to do is change the name PX-101 into Wah, and that's it.

 

[el murdoque]

My understanding from talking to guitar players is that the Lightspeed is one of the "best" (I know it's subjective) overdrives out there...especially for country players.

There is very little info on how does it work with bass though.

I would be very interested to read your opinion on this one...

It seems like this one was a secret tip for a while before it was everywhere on guitar boards. Youtube is full of demos and people singing their praise. But I could not find any bass related content.


I did look for frequency response charts and found this:

Tone Maps - RhPf Electronics*

Interactive guitar pedal tone maps by RhPf Electronics. Compare frequency responses of classic and boutique pedals in real time.

rhpfelectronics.com

VERY cool project, check it out!

From what I can see on that, is that there should not be enough low end loss to worry, and to get to Klon levels of high mid/treble boost (that let you dial down on the loudness and therefore create the impression of low end loss), you would have to run both gain and tone super high.

 

[projectapollo]

My understanding from talking to guitar players is that the Lightspeed is one of the "best" (I know it's subjective) overdrives out there...especially for country players.

There is very little info on how does it work with bass though.

I would be very interested to read your opinion on this one...

@NickyBass uses the Greer lightspeed after trying numerous dirt pedals. Maybe he can offer some insights.

 

[el murdoque]

Make sure you try it with some fuzz before or after to get some good filter sweeps. Octave also sounds good going into a wah.

Yesterday, I ran the Tube Drive with medium/high distortion into the wah. That was incredibly good. So good that I brought out my calipers to measure the spaces and found that I could move the Prunes&Custard to the lower deck and remove the switch I use for page up and page down on the Morningstar, I could fit the Tube Drive on the board. Then I realized that I currently have 11 outlets for power from the Cioks DC-7 and 4 and my board has 11 pedals that need power. I do have a Crux, but the 4 has no output, so I would need to get an 8 for the output, but then I would not need the Crux any more because I'd have two outputs that could be used for the Tube Drive - or I could get creative on the cabling and maybe daisy chain a bit to free up two outlets,
and then I realized that I don't have a free spot on the Loop switcher and would have to hook the Tube Drive in the same loop as the wah and that was where I gave up.

 

[NickyBass]

@NickyBass uses the Greer lightspeed after trying numerous dirt pedals. Maybe he can offer some insights.

The Lightspeed is my favorite OD. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, and there were a lot of cool pedals. The Jellyfish, DCX, Grizzly, 1981 LVL, etc.
The Lightspeed just does what I like. It’s a nice open and transparent, organic drive. No low end loss that I can perceive. It’s not melt your face drive. I use it mostly as a low gain drive for pick playing. It’s worth a try. The only thing I don’t like about it is side jacks.

 

[sunbeast]

Yesterday, I ran the Tube Drive with medium/high distortion into the wah. That was incredibly good. So good that I brought out my calipers to measure the spaces and found that I could move the Prunes&Custard to the lower deck and remove the switch I use for page up and page down on the Morningstar, I could fit the Tube Drive on the board. Then I realized that I currently have 11 outlets for power from the Cioks DC-7 and 4 and my board has 11 pedals that need power. I do have a Crux, but the 4 has no output, so I would need to get an 8 for the output, but then I would not need the Crux any more because I'd have two outputs that could be used for the Tube Drive - or I could get creative on the cabling and maybe daisy chain a bit to free up two outlets,
and then I realized that I don't have a free spot on the Loop switcher and would have to hook the Tube Drive in the same loop as the wah and that was where I gave up.

In my experience, I’ve always been able to daisy-chain a handful of pedals on a large board without issues. I was running a board for awhile with an Eventide Powermax (almost identical to Cioks DC7) with daisy-chains coming off 4 of the outputs without any excess noise issues- it did take a little while to figure out what could chain with what!). Through experimentation you’ll probably find noise issues are only really tied to a few pedals in any board, and sometimes it might be a certain combination that don’t get along. Digital pedals and tube pedals are common offenders, as are analog delay-based units (including chorus, flanger, etc because of clock and/or LFO noise), and certain brands also seem to make a lot of problem pedals (I’ve often had issues daisy-chaining many EHX pedals with others for some reason, and not just the digital units).

 

[el murdoque]

In my experience, I’ve always been able to daisy-chain a handful of pedals on a large board without issues. I was running a board for awhile with an Eventide Powermax (almost identical to Cioks DC7) with daisy-chains coming off 4 of the outputs without any excess noise issues- it did take a little while to figure out what could chain with what!). Through experimentation you’ll probably find noise issues are only really tied to a few pedals in any board, and sometimes it might be a certain combination that don’t get along. Digital pedals and tube pedals are common offenders, as are analog delay-based units (including chorus, flanger, etc because of clock and/or LFO noise), and certain brands also seem to make a lot of problem pedals (I’ve often had issues daisy-chaining many EHX pedals with others for some reason, and not just the digital units).

In days of yore, I was known to run a board with a full dozen pedals on nothing but a Harley Benton Powerplant Jr.
I only changed to the boring safety of a Cioks PSU when two Y-Cabled 125mA outlets would or would not meet the requirements of 250 mA on a Strymon pedal, depending on ... the humidity? the mood? I never found out.