Source Audio Sorcerers Society (S.A.S.S) Part 3

[rsmith601]

Ok, I've got MY sound. For now at least. I downloaded the manual which explained the different filters available, and ended up on 12. The low Q MXR-based one. Which is ironic since I had the MXR as #2 on my list! Oh, well. Now I've got the "MXR" and plenty of others.

To recap, the mix tonight sounded great. Still just a touch harsh on occasion, but I can likely fix that with some tweaking or cleaner playing when necessary. This is a very responsive pedal! Now, let's see how many more times I can waffle on this pedal. I've barely had it a day and have gone back and forth at least twice each now...

Keep in mind that this pedal is the one that launched all of our Bass Envelope Filter madness. It does not have all the controls of later models, but it is becoming a bit of a classic. And, if I can guess correctly that you got this used (no manual) that's lots of pedal for the money.

We tried to kill it a few times, but it has stayed in production by popular demand.

 

[kleinenenten]

Keep in mind that this pedal is the one that launched all of our Bass Envelope Filter madness. It does not have all the controls of later models, but it is becoming a bit of a classic. And, if I can guess correctly that you got this used (no manual) that's lots of pedal for the money.

We tried to kill it a few times, but it has stayed in production by popular demand.

It's got plenty of controls - likely more than I'll need. I'm only using a filter sparingly in a few parts, but wanted one that was versatile for if/when I need different sounds. I can see why it spawned plenty of other pedals. I'm not currently suffering from (filter) madness, but it's certainly a fun effect! Thanks for making an awesome product, and you're correct in deducing it was used.

 

[Adamixoye]

@ncabral @TheSleeve

A while ago, I posted this:


Somehow I managed to fix it, though I wasn't totally sure what happened. I had a variety of theories. Well, it came back. Only this time it's different---but I think it confirms an incomplete theory I had.

I had hypothesized that the reason my pedals kept turning back "on" is that it was actually randomly defaulting to scene 0 on my Hub, where I had inadvertently saved a scene with the Rat model. That's what is shown in the Vine. So I erased scene 0 and set it to a null scene (that is, no pedals involved, a truly erased scene), and everything seemed to work okay. For MIDI-related reasons about my setup that I won't describe here, the actual scenes I was using started on 24 anyway.

Well, for subsequent complicated MIDI-related reasons, I rearranged my scenes and started using those lower-numbered scenes starting at 0. Now instead of being a truly blank/null scene, I had Scene 0 set to a "Blank Scene," that is, a scene with the proper pedals from my setup all disengaged. Then I experienced the behavior shown in the Vine above, except all of my pedals kept switching off after being engaged---instead of defaulting to a certain setting, nothing would stay engaged. However, this made total sense with my theory---instead of defaulting to the Rat-based scene, it was defaulting to an "all-off" scene. However, when this happened was random. In some cases, it was almost immediate; in other cases, several seconds passed; there were a few extreme cases where it was maybe something like a minute.

As I've said before, my MIDI routing is complicated, and I have multiple MIDI-enabled devices connected. I did a lot of experimenting and found multiple possibilities...
---When I switch my Beat Buddy from "OUT" to "THRU," the switching seemed to stop. At the least, it did not happen as swiftly. But I think it may have happened once or twice.
---With my Beat Buddy on "THRU" there was a DEFINITE correlation that this would happen when I moved my Hub-connected expression pedal. I would just touch it and the pedals would disengage.
---My Hub is connected both MIDI in and MIDI out; disconnecting one or the other does change things. Disconnecting the "in" and my Beat Buddy could be on "OUT" without causing this to happen. However, the expression pedal issue still happened (I think). This was hard to test. I didn't test this as systematically as I should have.

To backtrack a bit, this was before I remembered my "Scene 0" theory. So I was having all of these problems last night, and then I remembered I could try Scene 0 as a "null" (instead of "blank") scene. I tried that this morning and...I think it worked. I didn't experience the issue a single time over several minutes, while testing the various possibilities of my MIDI connections. Combined with the fact that this was my previous solution (creating Scene 0 as "null," even though I didn't fully realize that may have been what did it), I am now pretty sure that this is what's going on.

TL;DR
I think the Hub (or maybe just mine?) has a bug that randomly defaults to Scene 0 when receiving certain non-PC MIDI data, which may or may not be unique to my complicated MIDI setup/routing. A kludge around this appears to be to set Scene 0 to a "null" scene, wasting this scene, but otherwise effective.

 

[gastric]

Your issues are probably MIDI related. Perhaps one of your devices is simply sending out PC0 periodically which is the easiest explanation of your Hub being set back to Scene 1.

Is it possible to stick a laptop between the last device in your MIDI chain and your Hub? You could then run a MIDI Monitor app and see ALL of the MIDI data being sent to the Hub to see what might be causing it. Most MIDI Monitor apps also have filters built in, so you could filter out MIDI Clock and/or Active Sense. A lot of Roland gear spams tons of Active Sense data that can overwhelm some devices that don't ignore / filter it.

Also, you can then record the MIDI stream with your computer. Identify the timestamp area the problem occurs, then scroll back to just a little before it, play it back and see if that reproduces it. You could then analyze that area of the MIDI stream to see what the culprit is.

 

[Nic.]

@Adamixoye whoa. That's a brilliant deduction and looks like you did a pretty good job of fixing it. Scene 0 is just one scene of many, I don't think anyone really needs it.

 

[Adamixoye]

Your issues are probably MIDI related. Perhaps one of your devices is simply sending out PC0 periodically which is the easiest explanation of your Hub being set back to Scene 1.

This was definitely my first hypothesis, but there is strong circumstantial---arguably conclusive---evidence that this is not the case.

• First, I recently switched Hub channels from 6 to 7. So this phantom PC0 would have to be on both of those channels. BUT, I have other pedals on channels 3, 4, 5, and 6 that would be affected by a PC0 code on all channels (or also on channel 6 in the one case---my M5 and Hub were both on 6 before a recent change), and none of them have ever inexplicably jumped to Preset 0. So I think that's the best argument that this is not what is happening.
• Second, the Beat Buddy should not, to my knowledge, do PC messages at all. It's strictly tempo/start/stop.
• Third, it wouldn't explain the expression pedal in any way that I can think of. Again, I wasn't 100% systematic, but something was clearly going on with the expression pedal. When I turned the Beat Buddy to "THRU" so that I wouldn't get the change from that, it would happen just from moving my expression pedal (EB VP Jr. connected to the 1/4" expression input on the Hub using an insert cable). This was immediate and very clear cut. What was less clear cut (mostly in that I was trying a bunch of things and don't remember now) was how unplugging the MIDI cables attached to the Hub affected this. At first blush, you might not think this is even MIDI related, but I'll come back to this in a second.

Is it possible to stick a laptop between the last device in your MIDI chain and your Hub? You could then run a MIDI Monitor app and see ALL of the MIDI data being sent to the Hub to see what might be causing it. Most MIDI Monitor apps also have filters built in, so you could filter out MIDI Clock and/or Active Sense. A lot of Roland gear spams tons of Active Sense data that can overwhelm some devices that don't ignore / filter it.

Also, you can then record the MIDI stream with your computer. Identify the timestamp area the problem occurs, then scroll back to just a little before it, play it back and see if that reproduces it. You could then analyze that area of the MIDI stream to see what the culprit is.

Since I have a kludge that worked once (even when I didn't realize it) and seems to be working again, I may not pursue this much further. However, I considered doing something like this. I have one of these:

Would it work for me to basically plug in my incoming MIDI chain into this, connect it to laptop via USB, and then out to the Hub? Is there a program would you recommend for a Mac laptop that would basically do MIDI monitoring + let the signal go thru?

================================================

For what it's worth, my unnecessarily complicated MIDI chain is the following:

Singular Sound Beat Buddy --> MIDI Solutions Quadra Merge input 1
Confusion Studios MIDI Designer on iPad --> Zivix PUC --> MIDI Solutions Quadra Merge input 2
Source Audio Hub --> MIDI Solutions Quadra Merge input 3
-->
MIDI Solutions Quadra Merge --> MIDI Solutions Quadra Thru
-->
MIDI Solutions Quadra Thru output 1 --> Eventide Pitchfactor --> Eventide Modfactor --> Line6 M5
MIDI Solutions Quadra Thru output 2 --> Source Audio Hub
MIDI Solutions Quadra Thru output 3 --> Pigtronix Infinity

Yes, technically, the Hub is looped back on itself. It is set to "OUT" rather than "THRU." The idea was I need PC/CC from MIDI Designer and tempo from the Beat Buddy to go the Hub, but I want the Hub HH3/expression output via MIDI to go to some of the other pedals (like the M5), which also needed tempo and PC commands. I've kind of given up on this for now---I've been beating the drum that the Hub should be able to have different input/output channels for MIDI so that I could output HH3 to my M5 on a different channel than the incoming PC commands for the Hub, but having them on the same channel just for that reason is a minor pain, so I decided to wait until Source Audio hopefully makes that features available.

Relevant to this discussion, it's this (possibly unnecessary) self-looping that makes me think that the Hub could interpret the otherwise-analog 1/4" expression pedal signal as a MIDI signal. But again, I would need to test that a little more rigorously and systematically. If this is the case, then it's also important to note that the CC-generated data from this is somehow causing the effect of a PC signal to the Hub.

@Adamixoye whoa. That's a brilliant deduction and looks like you did a pretty good job of fixing it. Scene 0 is just one scene of many, I don't think anyone really needs it.

Thanks---I hope I'm right this time! I still worry there is a 5-10% chance that I will be posting back here in week or two about how this has resurfaced and I still can't figure it out. You're also correct that while losing one scene is annoying, it's not a big deal in the big picture. I doubt anyone is using all 128 scenes.

 

[gastric]

On a Mac I use this for MIDI monitoring: snoize: MIDI Monitor

It's pretty simple, and includes filtering.

 

[Adamixoye]

On a Mac I use this for MIDI monitoring: snoize: MIDI Monitor

It's pretty simple, and includes filtering.

Thanks. Although as I said, if I really have solved it with my kludge, then I may not spend much more time troubleshooting. (Unless SA wants me to figure out the problem for a future product discount! )

 

[gastric]

You have some pretty complicated MIDI routing going on, could be educational for you regardless. Lets you see exactly what all your gear is doing. MIDI is an ancient serial technology, so if one box is spewing tons of useless data it can choke up the processing downstream.

 

[Adamixoye]

Yeah, it is more complicated than I had initially intended, but at the same time that's just the way it worked out. Some people flip fuzz pedals like there is no tomorrow, 18-24 months ago I became addicted to MIDI (syncing tempo was my gateway drug).

Conceptually, it's a little simpler than it looks, because it is basically a bunch of pedals outputting MIDI --> merged with the Quadra Merge --> split up again with the Quadra Thru --> split out to a bunch of pedals that receive MIDI. The reason for most of that is things that do not merge MIDI output and Thru (Beat Buddy / Hub) or that only have one physical MIDI connection (Infinity / PUC) or do not do any MIDI Thru (M5). Then the one addition complication to the "simple" routing I described above is that this makes the Hub to technically be in its own loop, but given that it doesn't output much in "OUT" mode (as opposed to "THRU"), it hopefully shouldn't matter that much.

Back to the topic...yeah, it might be educational. I am curious, but my curiosity might not outweigh my laziness. I would also have to "break" my setup again by setting up a non-null Hub Preset 0 (pretty easy to do, but still).

 

[Nic.]

I'm actually having serious thoughts about downsizing to just the Manta plus hothand for a while. One 'distortion' preset and one hothand-filter preset. I've no major gigs coming up for a while until July, so this seems like a good chance to force myself to go back to basics - jammed with no effects at all today and I realize I'm relying on the OFD tube drive compression a bit too much. I wonder how well this will work out!

 

[FretNoMore]

I'm actually having serious thoughts about downsizing to just the Manta plus hothand for a while. One 'distortion' preset and one hothand-filter preset. I've no major gigs coming up for a while, so this seems like a good chance to force myself to go back to basics. I wonder how well that would work out!

The idea of limiting yourself to focus on one thing or one technique at a time comes up now and then; use only one camea lens when you photograph, use only one pedal on your pedal board - maybe it helps to explore what you can do and to fine tune your use of the gear. I'm too fond of all my toys to do this though.

 

[Nic.]

The idea of limiting yourself to focus on one thing or one technique at a time comes up now and then; use only one camea lens when you photograph, use only one pedal on your pedal board - maybe it helps to explore what you can do and to fine tune your use of the gear. I'm too fond of all my toys to do this though.

Yeah me too, I've been too fond of the range of sounds from my multiwave and the attack from my OFD. I guess I haven't really been using the manta to it's full potential though, just as a filter and once in a while a fuzz.

 

[adamaarts]

Here's part one of my Muse sounds How To, no major SA stuff here other than all the midi stuff going on. The OFD is set to high cut only, M9 to synth sound, and Manta used clean blend only and volume control.

I am still planning on making the rest, I didn't want to try and cram then all in a super long video.

 

[ferdinandstrat]

Hey guys, I am a proud and loving owner of that beast known as the Manta and its symbiotic companion the Hot Hand.

Recently I've been wanting to purchase a Zoom B3 because my DE7, Smashbox and PS3 Phaser just wont cut it anymore and the Manta for me is a one trick pony that does its one trick VERY WELL. My guitar player with whom I consult about gear all the time brought up an interesting question however, how do the Manta, Hot Hand and B3 go along?

Does anyone have any experience running the Hot Hand into the B3? Running a compressor patch from the B3 into the Manta or any different effect from the B3 into the Manta? Should I run the Manta first and then the B3 or the other way around?

Any owners of both that can school me on this one?

 

[adamaarts]

You lost me at 'one trick pony'

I don't see why the B3 would be an issue. I've thought of getting one myself, just never pulled the trigger.

 

[jaysbass2002]

You lost me at 'one trick pony'

One trick pony? Hmmm do you have the same Manta pedal as I do?

 

[ferdinandstrat]

You lost me at 'one trick pony'

I don't see why the B3 would be an issue. I've thought of getting one myself, just never pulled the trigger.

It's my "one trick pony", the idea was to rely on it for two different wobble sounds while the B3 dealt with synth and envelope sounds.

Or maybe the other way around? Who knows? Anyone here have a B3 and a Manta and a Hot Hand?

I am a really a plug and play type of guy which goes against what I am saying here since I got the Manta which I love but got a bit lost in all the options and I am getting myself a compact multi-FX. Basically I set it up for one standard wobble sound and one standard envelope sound. I didnt play much with it. Hell I dont even remember really what settings its on right now.

 

[Nic.]

......my hothand receiver just connected to my Bluetooth speakers. I know because when I turned on the power on my pedals, moments later, my Bluetooth speakers played the "now connected" sound.

I've long suspected this is the reason why my hothand signal cuts out occasionally, and it was really bad the one time I forgot to turn off my phone's Bluetooth at a rehearsal. That, and that the connectivity is extremely location dependent.

Is there any way to prevent this from happening? The signal doesn't seem to "lock" to my ring that well. In problematic locations, a few times each rehearsal the light on the receiver will "blur", like flicker very fast, turn off, start 'beeping' again and if I'm lucky, reconnect to my ring automatically.

By the way, my Bluetooth speakers are these: The Nakamichi NBS 10 Bluetooth Stereo Speakers
and my phone is a Sony Xperia Z2. I don't know what else might have been trying to connect to my hothand at the various places I've used it at. Also, I don't know if Bluetooth wireless regulations down here in Singapore are different from what you guys have wherever you are, I pretty much never see connectivity problems discussed here.

 

[rsmith601]

......my hothand receiver just connected to my Bluetooth speakers. I know because when I turned on the power on my pedals, moments later, my Bluetooth speakers played the "now connected" sound.

I've long suspected this is the reason why my hothand signal cuts out occasionally, and it was really bad the one time I forgot to turn off my phone's Bluetooth at a rehearsal. That, and that the connectivity is extremely location dependent.

Is there any way to prevent this from happening? The signal doesn't seem to "lock" to my ring that well. In problematic locations, a few times each rehearsal the light on the receiver will "blur", like flicker very fast, turn off, start 'beeping' again and if I'm lucky, reconnect to my ring automatically.

By the way, my Bluetooth speakers are these: The Nakamichi NBS 10 Bluetooth Stereo Speakers
and my phone is a Sony Xperia Z2. I don't know what else might have been trying to connect to my hothand at the various places I've used it at. Also, I don't know if Bluetooth wireless regulations down here in Singapore are different from what you guys have wherever you are, I pretty much never see connectivity problems discussed here.

Hi Nic,
Talked to Jesse about this. He thinks the likelihood of the HH3 connecting to a Bluetooth device is zero. With that said, the amount of noise and interference from WiFi and Bluetooth devices is making the airwaves where the HH3 operates more and more noisy than when we first introduced the product. Be sure the HH3 receiver is up a bit on your board to that it is in the best position to receive a signal. The higher and less surrounded by other metal boxes the better. Hope this does it!