My Dirt Bender - Another Jounal

[el murdoque]

Here's a gut shot.

The PCB calls it the MOSKYaudio Mini K-C(V1.1)-B

So it's a "Mini Klon Centaur Version 1.1 B" if you want to believe my translation.

 

[el murdoque]

Armed with my limited knowledge about the Klon circuit, I set the Tumnus and the Golden Horse side by side and started comparing them.
The Tumnus is a bit chubby, weighing in at 164g against the lean Horse with 137g, but who's counting?
Clicking them on and off in rapid succession while toying around with the knobs, there is no question which pedal is 150 bucks and which is 26.
The Mosky feels surprisingly good when you consider the price, but when you don't, it does not hold up to the standards my fingers are used to.
BUT! Once set you're not gonna twiddle the knobs much and usually just slap it onto your board where it'll be permanently connected and only the foot switch will see use, and that really feels solid. Using fingers, the Tumnus feels better, but using shoes you step on it and get an audible and tactile click from both.
How long will the cheaper jacks and switch on the Horse last? How much longer will the Tumnus work? Considering money again, you could replace your Horse three times and still come out ahead.

Let's get to how it sounds.
Setting it up, there is no noise added with the knobs in a rather civil setting. Cranking either the Treble or the Gain fully CW, it will introduce a nasty squeal along with a raised noise floor, but the squeal gets eliminated in my LPF, so it's probably 10kHz or thereabouts. The noise floor still gets through, but that's high gain settings - even though the Wampler shows no such issue.

I quickly learned that the gain and treble knob on the Wampler and on the Horse are not exact copies of each other. I also have the feeling that the Wampler has more output. Since the Klon is designed to push/overload the devices that follow down the chain, output is somewhat relevant.
I felt that raising the output on the Wampler beyond unity feels very satisfying because there is a little something in there that tries hard to escape detection but makes things a little more tidy, raising the output on the Horse introduced more noise and felt more like "gain pedal set loud" than anything else.
Setting one pedal to do something and then copying the knob positions to the other did, as stated, not create a 1:1 copy, but brought me into the general area and I could fine tune from there. I want to say one last time that setting knobs on the Wampler felt so much better, now I'll shut up about how the knobs feel.
With what I perceived as the closest I could match the two pedals, there was still a subtle but audible difference, and that difference is the chunk size of the grain I'm getting. While the Tumnus supplies a very fine grain that is perfectly even, the Mosky allowed for a slightly bigger margin in the process of grain QC.
That takes away some of the fascination I had when first trying the Wampler pedal. It makes the hard clipping more evident.
With the Tumnus, that hard clipping is a harsh measure, applied in a silky smooth way. You run your hand over the surface and while you feel the grain, you're calmed by how it feels exactly the same no matter where you touch. Imagine a Zen garden after someone very practiced has raked it.
Now imagine a Zen garden where someone has tossed in a few handfuls of very fine but not-near-as-fine-as-Zen-garden-sand gravel and raked it then, and you get what I'm complaining about the texture of the drive of the Mosky vs. the Wampler.

 

[Teryup]

Keeping things busy, I'm starting a chapter I want to call

"The Cork Sniffer vs. The Frat-Party Cardbordeaux".

This one goes for 26 bucks on those Asian shopping platforms:

View attachment 7076532I bought a Mosky, but there are different brand names out there, I suspect they all come from the same source.

I gotta start this off with a rant. The unboxing experience was as expected. A black cardboard box with the pedal inside, wrapped in bubble wrap and nothing else.
However, looking at the graphic, this shows a centaur, wielding ... a Dane axe. Those weapons were in use in northern Europe from the 10th century, but the long shafted version pictured here came later, used as an infantry weapon until the advance in armor technique brought plate and the "meat cleaver on a long stick" needed refinement, which led to the poleaxe and the halberd.
The centaur is rooted in Greek mythology, and the ancient Greeks did not use long handled single bladed axes in their warfare, even the use of double headed axes was extremely rare.
This is my only shot at trying to explain what the creature is doing in that picture. The Dane axe is meant to be wielded two handed and swung like an axe. It's function is parting flesh and leather armor, also being quite effective against chain mail, but it cannot pierce a target. Also, the weight balance of the head and the shaft makes it very hard and quite imprecise to throw, it will most likely tumble in mid air. You want the center of gravity slightly shifted forward on a throwing spear, but put too much heavy metal in the tip and the balance is off. Since this creature comes from a culture that knew javelins but did not know the Dane axe, it might be that the centaur simply had not figured out how it works when the picture was taken.

I am glad to know that I am not the only one who expects accuracy in the weapon techniques of my mythological creatures, even when used as a logo.

 

[el murdoque]

I am glad to know that I am not the only one who expects accuracy in the weapon techniques of my mythological creatures, even when used as a logo.

It grinds my gears somewhat fiercely.

 

[Ritter667]

Keeping things busy, I'm starting a chapter I want to call

"The Cork Sniffer vs. The Frat-Party Cardbordeaux".

This one goes for 26 bucks on those Asian shopping platforms:

View attachment 7076532I bought a Mosky, but there are different brand names out there, I suspect they all come from the same source.

I gotta start this off with a rant. The unboxing experience was as expected. A black cardboard box with the pedal inside, wrapped in bubble wrap and nothing else.
However, looking at the graphic, this shows a centaur, wielding ... a Dane axe. Those weapons were in use in northern Europe from the 10th century, but the long shafted version pictured here came later, used as an infantry weapon until the advance in armor technique brought plate and the "meat cleaver on a long stick" needed refinement, which led to the poleaxe and the halberd.
The centaur is rooted in Greek mythology, and the ancient Greeks did not use long handled single bladed axes in their warfare, even the use of double headed axes was extremely rare.
This is my only shot at trying to explain what the creature is doing in that picture. The Dane axe is meant to be wielded two handed and swung like an axe. It's function is parting flesh and leather armor, also being quite effective against chain mail, but it cannot pierce a target. Also, the weight balance of the head and the shaft makes it very hard and quite imprecise to throw, it will most likely tumble in mid air. You want the center of gravity slightly shifted forward on a throwing spear, but put too much heavy metal in the tip and the balance is off. Since this creature comes from a culture that knew javelins but did not know the Dane axe, it might be that the centaur simply had not figured out how it works when the picture was taken.

I've only heard great things about that pedal.

Won a couple of click bait YouTube blindfold competitions against an original close too.

And their Mosky Black Rat is an amazing RAT clone, especially for bass, with both a classic and Turbo RAT mode.

 

[Maxi Funkl]

While not cheap I was wondering has anyone tried this pedal.

search.app

 

[mouthmw]

Let's start with a short word on the Analogman:
It looks nice and sounds seriously good. I have yet to figure out the depth switch and the mix knob. I would assume the mix knob does not go from 0-100% but something like 30-70%, so it's actually usable through the entire sweep.
The depth knob has three positions. Middle sounds a little anemic, lower position feels like its deeper and upper position sounds like it even adds a bit of bass.

It's not your 80's in-your-face chorus. It's luxurious, rich and lush.
In the synth chain with low speed and high depth, it works to give the sound a lot of room and texture. Playing solo, it does the chorus thing extremely well. I am happy.

Yes I’ve read it’s like 30-70% with it being standard chorus in the middle (50%). Depth switch changes the delay time with up being the longest (giving you the bassiest tone), middle position being the shortest delay time (thinner, flanger like tone) and down position being the regular setting (mid delay time).

I think the lag control on Julia changes the delay times? How do you like it compared to Julia?

 

[sunbeast]

Yes I’ve read it’s like 30-70% with it being standard chorus in the middle (50%). Depth switch changes the delay time with up being the longest (giving you the bassiest tone), middle position being the shortest delay time (thinner, flanger like tone) and down position being the regular setting (mid delay time).

I think the lag control on Julia changes the delay times? How do you like it compared to Julia?

Yes this is correct- many years ago I went wild modding an old big-box EHX Small Clone (the Analogman Chorus is essentially a very well tuned + refined hot-rodded EHX Small Clone) and added many of these mods to it. It sounded fantastic but I took it a bit overboard and the pedal itself and my mods were pretty fragile so it was not very reliable (my soldering skills have improved immensely since).
The Depth control chooses different capacitors that change the clock time of the delay chip. Even with the only partial blend ability you can still get a pretty great vibrato with the Blend turned all the way up

 

[el murdoque]

I think the lag control on Julia changes the delay times? How do you like it compared to Julia?

I have not tried it with Julia. I compared it to the Mobius earlier. Mobius lost.

 

[el murdoque]

While not cheap I was wondering has anyone tried this pedal.

search.app

I'll order one as soon as I sell something.

 

[GrowlerBox]

It grinds my gears somewhat fiercely.

I don’t know about the technique, but that centaur has extraordinary wrist strength.

 

[el murdoque]

I don’t know about the technique, but that centaur has extraordinary wrist strength.

As "Just a Clown with an Axe" I'm sure you know about these things ;-)

 

[el murdoque]

Yesterday, I spent a good amount of time pondering the board I mostly use for the reggae band, the big one.

I am reluctant to touch anything because it works so well, but I'm also driven to get some upgrades going. For esoteric reasons I would like to circumvent digital pedals whenever possible and that board has/had a Stymon Mobius and a C4. The plan is to use the Analogman Mini Chorus to replace the Mobius. Severely limited in function, but the Chorus is the main thing I use in the Mobius.
The C4 could be replaced by the Doom2 and the PX-101, I did some A/B testing and the main synth sound I use from the C4 can be replicated.
The one digital effect I won't get around is the reverb, but the BigSky has an analog dry path, so only the reverb trails are digital, I can tolerate that.

So I did a mockup of the Board by pulling off the pedals and rearranging them, without touching any cables yet, the result looks like this:

....hidden in the lower deck are the BDPG and the Xotic BB-Preamp, along with the power and the Morningstar ML-5.
This looks promising, but I'm gonna be honest and say I'm not looking forward to running cables to and from everything.

 

[mouthmw]

Is that an led damper on your RFE? I plan to get one for my LPF/HPF and saw Rockboard dampers in two versions.

 

[el murdoque]

Is that an led damper on your RFE? I plan to get one for my LPF/HPF and saw Rockboard dampers in two versions.

Yes, that's the Rockboard LED dampener. I always have a few of those lying around for when builders think it's a good idea to use LEDs that can double as flak searchlights.

 

[sloppy_phil]

Is that an led damper on your RFE? I plan to get one for my LPF/HPF and saw Rockboard dampers in two versions.

@mouthmw I also use the jewel-shaped dampeners from Rockboard. They are a godsend for my eyes on dimly lit stages!

@el murdoque nobody likes running the cables. Which is why I think the satisfaction tends to be so high when a new board build is completed; that was just a crapton of effort to put in, so stand back and revel in your handiwork!

 

[mouthmw]

@mouthmw I also use the jewel-shaped dampeners from Rockboard. They are a godsend for my eyes on dimly lit stages!

How’s the adhesive holding up? They don’t get bumped off? I guess I could always use a bit of loctite if I wanted to make it more “permanent”.

 

[warptheory]

How’s the adhesive holding up? They don’t get bumped off? I guess I could always use a bit of loctite if I wanted to make it more “permanent”.

I have them on a couple Broughton pedals, they seem to hold up so far, think I've had them on for 2 months.

 

[sloppy_phil]

How’s the adhesive holding up? They don’t get bumped off? I guess I could always use a bit of loctite if I wanted to make it more “permanent”.

Great! I've had them on at least half a dozen pedals for the better part of two years. Never been a hint of an issue, and that includes international air travel. The adhesive is just tacky enough that it stays well attached at all times, but can still be removed surprisingly easily (and cleanly; no residue!) with sufficient finger force.

 

[el murdoque]

Great! I've had them on at least half a dozen pedals for the better part of two years. Never been a hint of an issue, and that includes international air travel. The adhesive is just tacky enough that it stays well attached at all times, but can still be removed surprisingly easily (and cleanly; no residue!) with sufficient finger force.

I inserted a thin bladed and pried it off once, after it was on that pedal for about half a year. I then put the used one on another pedal where it stuck and held until I sold it.
There's really not much force to withstand as long as you use it as an effect pedal. And if it fails ... well. You gotta call off the gig because one of your LEDs is too bright?