Searching Artifakt Elements, new sounds from Source Audio

[mikeynets]

Even if where it would go in my chain is unknown!

Saturn works makes a pedal order switcher which would at least let you switch two pedals. And I think if you had some pedals in the effects loop of another plus the Saturn works switcher you could have the artifakt leapfrog several at a time. Maybe? Idk

 

[bassbrad]

Has the ms70+ cured the tone suck the ms70 has? I had one and it was lovely but had to be in a bypassable loop. Replaced it with an h9 with is less lowfi!

I have not had issue with insertion loss either as part of a signal chain or as an insert effect but it is always on at least 1 effect for ambient or room reverb, bypass mode is used for tuning/mute.

 

[Gibs210]

There’s a ton of guitar videos out there of this thing and most of them are folks just going through the built in ‘engines’ and presets - this one is either good presentation or he seems to be building his own presets to do things - which is really interesting.
I am still convinced the bass uses of this pedal will be unlocked more as ppl play with it as more a multifx thing than specific low-fi pedal! I have a significant birthday coming up just before Christmas - it’s on my list!!

I’m considering making a quick run thru video of using the artifakt as a multi effect pedal using midi and a single preset. Is that something that sounds intriguing to see from everyone here? It will be guitar bent, but it’s more the concept that I’m trying to prove than the sounds for a certain instrument.

 

[mikeynets]

I’m considering making a quick run thru video of using the artifakt as a multi effect pedal using midi and a single preset. Is that something that sounds intriguing to see from everyone here? It will be guitar bent, but it’s more the concept that I’m trying to prove than the sounds for a certain instrument.

100% want to see this.

Once I saw the blocks on Neuro, I knew this had the potential to be my mini-multi one pedal solution. But I've never messed with MIDI so I'm still a little gun shy.

Question: with MIDI, would it be possible to turn on/off more than one block in a preset?

 

[Luke the Fluke]

I’m considering making a quick run thru video of using the artifakt as a multi effect pedal using midi and a single preset. Is that something that sounds intriguing to see from everyone here? It will be guitar bent, but it’s more the concept that I’m trying to prove than the sounds for a certain instrument.

I think it sounds great (and can’t hurt your sales!)

 

[Gibs210]

100% want to see this.

Once I saw the blocks on Neuro, I knew this had the potential to be my mini-multi one pedal solution. But I've never messed with MIDI so I'm still a little gun shy.

Question: with MIDI, would it be possible to turn on/off more than one block in a preset?

Well, the midi controller that I tested it with just now only allows for up to 8 messages to be sent simultaneously, and all 8 blocks I assigned to enable turned on with a single press of a switch, so it will do at least up to 8 cc messages at one time.

 

[Luke the Fluke]

Artifakt as a bass pedal - my review after a few hours with it.

So the very kind @Quatschmacher lent me a Source Audio Artifakt to try and I wanted to share a brief first impressions review...
Firstly I had a C4 for years, so am used to the SA approach and was using Neuro3 on Mac OSX which for me has no bugs.
I've been using my sadowsky metro jazz with deadish strings through a JHS colourbox and then into a power amp and a LFSys cab designed to have a hifi type response - normally I play straight to the PA and use IEM so it's close to the PA sound.... I also chucked on my recently purchased PastFX PF101 filter as comparison.

Form factor...
You know the One series pedals with 4 knobs and one toggle? You know that alt switch at the back you could never quite get to work properly to set the volume, and a brilliant effect hidden behind not-quite-enough controls? Well they fixed that! 5 knobs, one with a switch to assign 3 parameters to one, another switch to set other parameters, or 3 versions of the same parameter.... two soft controls which in layman's terms is you get to set multiple perameters to one knob....a second footswitch that can do multiple things.... oh and presets you can access without midi!

First impressions
This is the main reason why I'm writing this mini review. First impressions aint great for me. Click through the "engines" (essentially presets) and it sounds... ok. you know all the YouTube demos... well 90% of them just click through the engines and play.
Which sounds nice on guitar, and is accessible and makes it simple and is totally the right thing for SA to do given the market size for guitar players vs bass players and the fact the guys want to be able to eat... but it's a little underwealming for bass.

Noisy vinyl sounds, noisy radio hum with 'drop out' sounds, nice bit crush, a really good filter, and a surprisingly fun glitch.

Second impressions
This is where this pedal is more interesting for us bass players.
Ignore the "low fi" tag and replace it with "analogue" and it's essentially a kinda specific multifx unit with a curated set of blocks you can turn on and off (and apparently via midi)
So there's a ton of blocks I don't think I would use. The signal failure, vinyl noise and noise blocks I think have limited appeal to the general bass player.
But the rest are really good...
Listing the rest in signal chain order... (ignoring stereo for now)

• Compressor : simple compressor which can go either at the front or toward the end of the chain. Nice to be able to compress an effected signal and then blend in to the dry
• Glitch: it glitches, not played enough with it or with any other glitch pedal. Not sure where I would use it live but fun to mess with.
• Ringmod + Distort + Quantize and sample rate : mix and blend to your hearts content in parallel or series. I know some ppl love bit crush and ring mod, I'm more in the willing to experiment camp, what is nice is the distortion engine, from amp like ish drive, to that SA wave folding thing I like it's good.
• Tremolo wobbles
• Ladder filter : apparently based on a Moog ladder filter, I could get it very close to the PF101 (Moog MF101 clone) especially on 2 pole setting. Oh and it can go down. One of the presets is based on a Mutron, and it's very very good. For many of us this ladder filter will justify the price of admission on it's own
• Time based things: can't use at same time as glitch, but this is your chorus, flanger, delay, vinyl warp, reverb part. The reverb is kinda lo-fi and you can hear the reflections, which I need to play with but doesn't sound bad on bass. I have an H9 I picked up 6 months ago I'm exploring and some of the prettier reverbs just dont translate to what I want as much on bass so need to experiment in a mix with this, something like the EQD afterneith is fairly well received on bass and also does a reflective reverb. Delay I think I forgot to play with.
  The chorus/flange/Vibrato is pretty well equipped with controls and can get quite a nicetweakable sound. (@Gibs210 what's the difference between chorus 1 and 2? Chorus 1 sounded more "standard)
• Compressor can be stuck here if you prefer
• Old gear EQ - can make it sound like you are playing your bass through a Nokia 3310! woop. But where it is interesting is there's a high pass and low pass filter and simple multi band EQ here... Now I used to have a HX stomp... and tried the cab sims, tried lots of IR and found my happy place (for playing live) was something I learned off a guy on Facebook called Jon Willis, it was a simple EQ block, high pass and low pass to give an approximation of what a bass cab is doing, and then eq curves to copy whatever cab you like. The Artifakt can do that....

Right so if you've read this far you're like "so what? my Zoom MS60b can do all that, my HX stomp can, my Pod Go probably can too, why should I care about the Artifakt?"

If you go to the envelope filter block on a Zoom or HX or whatever, you load the block in and have an envelope filter.
Source audio being Source Audio let you turn it on and set the frequency and Q .... and then you're looking for the envelope bit... and it's in a different location... confusing, but you can turn it up (or down) and it's hidden amongst lots of other things.... and you realise you can control lots of things with the envelope... and lots of things with the LFO - the whole thing, the multi-block multifx thing is able to be joined together with the envelope and LFO.

What does this mean?
Well you can work out how to do a lot of stuff. And it's easy, you don't have Zoia level freedom, but you can do a load of stuff.
I've uploaded two patches this evening to Neuro hub, a B15 ish "amp sim" thing - to see if it's possible, and then an aproximation of the Fairfield Shallow Water (or strictly an approximation of my pedalpcb approximation of a shallow water) - and it was fun and rewarding to work out how to shape the sound the way I wanted too.

Then what?
I've come from C4 mindset - where I would set up the patch and then save it and never want to tweak it again as it made my head hurt.
But the Artifakt has the layer where you can assign the controls to new things and make your patch tweak able that way, there's an art to that too, and anyone downloading my shallow water patch won't know what I've set things too, or that ideally the filter doesn't go up much or whatever, but it's flexible and solves my main headache with the C4.

Conclusion
For us bass players there's more going on here than you initially thing. Sounds great and it's just fun to use.

 

[logdrum]

Time based things: can't use at same time as glitch,

You can add delay enablement as a soft control and you can assign that to the bandwidth switch or tap or hold behavior of the option footswitch. I am not quiet sure if it would cut the glitch, but think once it is replaying the time functions can take charge. You probably are correct but I think that{s you would override that limitation. I'll test this later

 

[Gibs210]

You can add delay enablement as a soft control and you can assign that to the bandwidth switch or tap or hold behavior of the option footswitch. I am not quiet sure if it would cut the glitch, but think once it is replaying the time functions can take charge. You probably are correct but I think that{s you would override that limitation. I'll test this later

View attachment 7075461

Turning on either glitch or delay/reverb will bypass the other block if it’s on. This is the only 2 blocks that cannot both be on at the same time.

 

[rsmith601]

Artifakt as a bass pedal - my review after a few hours with it.

So the very kind @Quatschmacher lent me a Source Audio Artifakt to try and I wanted to share a brief first impressions review...
Firstly I had a C4 for years, so am used to the SA approach and was using Neuro3 on Mac OSX which for me has no bugs.
I've been using my sadowsky metro jazz with deadish strings through a JHS colourbox and then into a power amp and a LFSys cab designed to have a hifi type response - normally I play straight to the PA and use IEM so it's close to the PA sound.... I also chucked on my recently purchased PastFX PF101 filter as comparison.

Form factor...
You know the One series pedals with 4 knobs and one toggle? You know that alt switch at the back you could never quite get to work properly to set the volume, and a brilliant effect hidden behind not-quite-enough controls? Well they fixed that! 5 knobs, one with a switch to assign 3 parameters to one, another switch to set other parameters, or 3 versions of the same parameter.... two soft controls which in layman's terms is you get to set multiple perameters to one knob....a second footswitch that can do multiple things.... oh and presets you can access without midi!

First impressions
This is the main reason why I'm writing this mini review. First impressions aint great for me. Click through the "engines" (essentially presets) and it sounds... ok. you know all the YouTube demos... well 90% of them just click through the engines and play.
Which sounds nice on guitar, and is accessible and makes it simple and is totally the right thing for SA to do given the market size for guitar players vs bass players and the fact the guys want to be able to eat... but it's a little underwealming for bass.

Noisy vinyl sounds, noisy radio hum with 'drop out' sounds, nice bit crush, a really good filter, and a surprisingly fun glitch.

Second impressions
This is where this pedal is more interesting for us bass players.
Ignore the "low fi" tag and replace it with "analogue" and it's essentially a kinda specific multifx unit with a curated set of blocks you can turn on and off (and apparently via midi)
So there's a ton of blocks I don't think I would use. The signal failure, vinyl noise and noise blocks I think have limited appeal to the general bass player.
But the rest are really good...
Listing the rest in signal chain order... (ignoring stereo for now)

• Compressor : simple compressor which can go either at the front or toward the end of the chain. Nice to be able to compress an effected signal and then blend in to the dry
• Glitch: it glitches, not played enough with it or with any other glitch pedal. Not sure where I would use it live but fun to mess with.
• Ringmod + Distort + Quantize and sample rate : mix and blend to your hearts content in parallel or series. I know some ppl love bit crush and ring mod, I'm more in the willing to experiment camp, what is nice is the distortion engine, from amp like ish drive, to that SA wave folding thing I like it's good.
• Tremolo wobbles
• Ladder filter : apparently based on a Moog ladder filter, I could get it very close to the PF101 (Moog MF101 clone) especially on 2 pole setting. Oh and it can go down. One of the presets is based on a Mutron, and it's very very good. For many of us this ladder filter will justify the price of admission on it's own
• Time based things: can't use at same time as glitch, but this is your chorus, flanger, delay, vinyl warp, reverb part. The reverb is kinda lo-fi and you can hear the reflections, which I need to play with but doesn't sound bad on bass. I have an H9 I picked up 6 months ago I'm exploring and some of the prettier reverbs just dont translate to what I want as much on bass so need to experiment in a mix with this, something like the EQD afterneith is fairly well received on bass and also does a reflective reverb. Delay I think I forgot to play with.
  The chorus/flange/Vibrato is pretty well equipped with controls and can get quite a nicetweakable sound. (@Gibs210 what's the difference between chorus 1 and 2? Chorus 1 sounded more "standard)
• Compressor can be stuck here if you prefer
• Old gear EQ - can make it sound like you are playing your bass through a Nokia 3310! woop. But where it is interesting is there's a high pass and low pass filter and simple multi band EQ here... Now I used to have a HX stomp... and tried the cab sims, tried lots of IR and found my happy place (for playing live) was something I learned off a guy on Facebook called Jon Willis, it was a simple EQ block, high pass and low pass to give an approximation of what a bass cab is doing, and then eq curves to copy whatever cab you like. The Artifakt can do that....

Right so if you've read this far you're like "so what? my Zoom MS60b can do all that, my HX stomp can, my Pod Go probably can too, why should I care about the Artifakt?"

If you go to the envelope filter block on a Zoom or HX or whatever, you load the block in and have an envelope filter.
Source audio being Source Audio let you turn it on and set the frequency and Q .... and then you're looking for the envelope bit... and it's in a different location... confusing, but you can turn it up (or down) and it's hidden amongst lots of other things.... and you realise you can control lots of things with the envelope... and lots of things with the LFO - the whole thing, the multi-block multifx thing is able to be joined together with the envelope and LFO.

What does this mean?
Well you can work out how to do a lot of stuff. And it's easy, you don't have Zoia level freedom, but you can do a load of stuff.
I've uploaded two patches this evening to Neuro hub, a B15 ish "amp sim" thing - to see if it's possible, and then an aproximation of the Fairfield Shallow Water (or strictly an approximation of my pedalpcb approximation of a shallow water) - and it was fun and rewarding to work out how to shape the sound the way I wanted too.

Then what?
I've come from C4 mindset - where I would set up the patch and then save it and never want to tweak it again as it made my head hurt.
But the Artifakt has the layer where you can assign the controls to new things and make your patch tweak able that way, there's an art to that too, and anyone downloading my shallow water patch won't know what I've set things too, or that ideally the filter doesn't go up much or whatever, but it's flexible and solves my main headache with the C4.

Conclusion
For us bass players there's more going on here than you initially thing. Sounds great and it's just fun to use.

Thank you!!!
We have a dedicated video about the Ladder Filter and using it for bass coming out soon. FYI @FilterFunk There is some other filter expert, but I can't remember is username!

 

[fivestringgecko]

Thank you!!!
We have a dedicated video about the Ladder Filter and using it for bass coming out soon. FYI @FilterFunk There is some other filter expert, but I can't remember is username!

I loooooove me some envelope filter for bass! Have owned or tried 40+ to date.

My initial impression of the filter in the Artifakt is that it's REALLY good, and I'm making a real effort to get back into some programming, especially now that some of the kinks with Neuro 3 have been worked out. I've got (what I think is) a very cool cinematic soundscape-y uVerb patch almost done, and am planning on digging into the Ladder Filter next. So many options for exploration in the Artifakt...

Looking forward to your video on it!

5sg.

 

[Luke the Fluke]

@rsmith601 - sure it will be baked into the circuit rather than software but I'll ask.... is there the chance in software in the future of a loop like you did in the C4, between the output of the ladder filter and the input of the reverb/delay?

 

[Gibs210]

@rsmith601 - sure it will be baked into the circuit rather than software but I'll ask.... is there the chance in software in the future of a loop like you did in the C4, between the output of the ladder filter and the input of the reverb/delay?

Not likely to happen, the routing to make the stereo blocks work and the ones that are only mono took a lot of work, adding effects loop capability would be a big risk, and a lot of work for what is likely, a small user base. Plus there’s always the risk of ground loop noise when doing effects loops.

 

[rsmith601]

@rsmith601 - sure it will be baked into the circuit rather than software but I'll ask.... is there the chance in software in the future of a loop like you did in the C4, between the output of the ladder filter and the input of the reverb/delay?

Initially, we thought mono was fine. Then we realized that lots of blocks (especially vinyl) needed to be in stereo. This forced to create as much as possible in stereo for many key blocks. This dictated the overall routing and changing this or adding new modes would be a nightmare, as @Gibs210 suggests.

 

[Luke the Fluke]

Initially, we thought mono was fine. Then we realized that lots of blocks (especially vinyl) needed to be in stereo. This forced to create as much as possible in stereo for many key blocks. This dictated the overall routing and changing this or adding new modes would be a nightmare, as @Gibs210 suggests.

Not likely to happen, the routing to make the stereo blocks work and the ones that are only mono took a lot of work, adding effects loop capability would be a big risk, and a lot of work for what is likely, a small user base. Plus there’s always the risk of ground loop noise when doing effects loops.

Fair enough!

 

[Quatschmacher]

 

[Luke the Fluke]

Oh that is brilliant

The filter is worth the price of admission alone

 

[bassbrad]

@Luke the Fluke Thank you for the review on the Artifakt, I appreciate your POV and well thought out text.

 

[Gibs210]

Been working on a preset for artifakt that I call “the multi effect” combined with a midi controller, there’s about 15 different blocks that can be turned on and off independently within the artifakt, with only the delay/reverb/modulation and glitch blocks not being able to both be on at one time (take that H9!)

Coupled with a midi controller, there’s a lot you can get out of the artifakt, using a single preset, grant it some of those blocks are specialized for lo Fi sounds, but you can get a good basic compressor, tremolo (I’ve been able to fake a decent harmonic trem coupled with the ladder filter), slapback delay, reverb, flange (I came up with a clever way to get those 3 effects using 1 knob and the toggle switch within this one preset!), glitch can be useful for ambient stuff, especially with a massive reverb and volume pedal behind it. 8 band graphic EQ, and distortions.

Planning on making a YouTube vid showing this off, but I’ve been seeing some areas where I could do some deeper exploration with the artifakt, midi, and some of the sounds that you can pull out of the artifakt. So I might try to do a video series that goes deeper on certain aspects of the pedal.

This experience has kinda renewed my idea of a compact board with a collider, 2 artifakts and a capable midi controller to cover all of my bases and still have some vast capability.

 

[Luke the Fluke]

Been working on a preset for artifakt that I call “the multi effect” combined with a midi controller, there’s about 15 different blocks that can be turned on and off independently within the artifakt, with only the delay/reverb/modulation and glitch blocks not being able to both be on at one time (take that H9!)

I’ve currently got a H9 here so was planning on doing a comparison as part of an updated review on how I’ve found the artifakt.
Compared to the modfactor stuff I much prefer the artifakts sound, reverb is obviously more lofi so you would need a collider, and c4 for the pitch/harmonising stuff