Quatschmacher

FINALLY! I got to try one of these today. Here’s my take: this is a really cool pedal! It does a ridiculous amount of stuff. I had a solid 2.5 hours with it (with 15 minutes on my Future Impact for comparison). The basic waveforms sound fantastic and fat. Dialling in a bit of the modulation knob, (which introduces a second oscillator with increasing amount of detune) gives a very analogue-sounding gentle phasing, especially on the sawtooth. I was using a Mexican P with rounds and tracking was great. There were two notes (low F# and F) which caused multiple triggering but that may have been the bass itself. With the synth voices, the lowpass filters sound gorgeous, especially with resonance. This is the best sounding digital filter I’ve heard. The cutoff goes way low (probably 40Hz or less). It is very easy to dial in good sounds quickly, and great ones once you’ve got the shift functions down, which doesn’t take too long. (The main thing which tripped me up was the fact that some knobs do completely different things (in shift and normal mode) depending on whether the pedal is in dry (not bypassed), mono, poly or arp mode. I can see how it can be easy to quickly lose track of which knobs are set to where. For instance, I was wondering why the dry envelope filtered sound sounded a bit naff. It turns out I’d inadvertently switched compression on which killed all the dynamics. I think this happened because the shift knob on this unit was switching out at the slightest release of pressure (I was operating it one-handed, thumb on button, fingers on dials); I was trying to adjust a different parameter. The triggered envelope control has some pretty cool possibilities and is capable of a reasonable range of sounds, though it is still frustrating that there isn’t separate control over the attack and decay. Due to the fact there’s no (filter) sustain control, the fast envelopes cut off the sound quite abrubtly at the end. This might also be partly to do with the fact that there’s no separate envelope depth control. The envelope follower was quite disappointing and didn’t seem to have much of a range. (Perhaps there’s a setting to adjust input gain somewhere but I was only using the quick-start manual as opposed to the full one.) That was a shame as the filter on the dry bass sounded pretty good. Not as fat as my analogue pedals but actually pretty decent. I’m pretty sure the disappointment is due to the lack of envelope sensitivity though as it sounded really rather good when sweeping the filter knob manually. There’s portamento! This is cool. Sadly the scaling on the knob means there’s much more travel devoted to the longer times than to the shorter (and more useable-to-me times). I only played with the arp and poly modes briefly. Arp produced some pretty cool sounds. Ring mod sounds cool too. I’m not sure if there’s a way to decouple it from the envelope whilst still having the envelope controlling the filter, I’ll have to investigate further. Pitch shifter sounds cool, though I didn’t play it much. I put the synth into the highest register for lead sounds and I thought it played much more tightly than the FI. (I’m interested to hear if the new FI update will change that as there is to be a new and improved tracking algorithm.) I’m partly regretting not having bought this last week when the eBay 15% discount was offered. I didn’t buy it today but I may in future next time a similar discount comes around. Yes, it has its limitations but it the sounds it does make are pretty awesome. I still hope that the Meris people consider a future firmware update to add more envelope control and refine the envelope follower. Quatschmacher out. 

Isn’t the Bananana a digital pedal? Sometimes they can be fussy about sharing power. It might be that having certain combination of pedals on together is causing the Bananana to receive too little power which can cause all sorts of weirdness. I had a similar issue with a couple of Source Audio pedals after it turned out that another pedal sharing the power had much higher consumption than I realised.

I bought a couple of Voodoo Lab power cables from Paulo and, aside from delay from the Christmas post, all went smoothly with prompt, friendly and clear communication. I’d have no hesitation in dealing again. Many thanks!

New patches added.

I’d suggest playing with the parameters on the pedal itself to hear what effect they have on any given sound. That’ll help with things like cutoff, resonance, attack, decay, envelope depth etc. Have a play with some of the patches which only use a single oscillator and a single waveform first (some of mine are of this type and labelled as such). If you have an iOS device then I’d highly recommend getting the Moog Model D app and having a play with that. The Model D is a great, easy-to-understand interface from which you can quickly learn more about synthesis. I’m certainly no master synthesist but a little knowledge can go a long way. Better still would be to pick up a cheap hardware monosynth. We are spoiled for choice these days and for the cost of a pedal or two you can get something really powerful and easy to learn on. Also, check out the old SOS Synth Secrets column - collated into one PDF file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_mpRWF7AYVw03MxhDMls9HGJBwNv4h6J/view?usp=drivesdk

I’ve just uploaded 8 new patches I’ve made to the folder. I made these at the keyboard so have yet to see how we’ll they work on bass. My reason behind this was that I wanted to get them to sound like proper keyboard patches and that is best achieved at the keyboard. Also, these were all made using the new (as opposed to the vintage) filter. Edit - they work just fine on bass.

If anything it’ll be more complex as there’ll be a mod matrix, which will be amazing! If by “simpler to use” you mean having drag-and-drop interface for transferring patches then I totally agree with you.

Just for reference, the Future Impact is under £340 new from Thomann; used they go between £250-275.

No one said anything about price. The features requested were pitch shift, wah and synth. I’m just mentioning an option that’s out there.

Wunjo is a bit like that sometimes too. They have a DSI Pro 2 which is “on sale” at exactly the same price it’s always been there.

Or one of those 9v battery snap to 2.1mm centre negative cables that come as standard with the Voodoo Lab power supplies. You might need to reverse the polarity as the snap normally plugs into the pedal rather than the battery.

Check out the new Enzo from Meris. It should cover that.

I knew there was an inner circle!

As a general tip to improve tracking: Motown-style foam under the bridge. The “Ain’t Nobody” patches I attempted have poor tracking but are vastly improved by the addition of a foam mute under the bridge!

Does that mean if I get enough I become a Basschat Overlord?

What do these Watts actually do?

EDIT 22/10/2019 As the new v3 firmware launched yesterday I will move the discussion to a new thread and lock this one as much of the information here has been superseded and/or incorporated into the new v3 manual. Thank you to everybody who contributed to discussion here as it helped get me involved in working with Panda and helped shape the manual for the new firmware. __________________________________________ Original post: At the behest of @Al Krow I’m going to start a page which should hopefully serve as a helpful resource for understanding and using the FI and for sharing patches. For the moment, I’ll include an explanation of some of the features in the editor, which I wrote as a PM to @GisserD, I’ll add to this in due course. There is a new editor due out after April so I’ll amend once I’ve had chance to familiarise myself with its enhanced features. If anyone would like me to explain a particular feature then please comment and I’ll do my best to add it below as quickly as possible. I’ll also include a link to patches I’ve created and will add to this as I create new ones. Likewise, if you have useful tips or patches to share then please do! Please give me a “like” or comment if you’ve found this useful. It’ll encourage me to do more! Thanks. __________________________________________ Editor tips: In the VCF/MODULATION section, “Freq Vintage” is the cutoff of the original Deep Impact filter (with its imperfect scaling). “Freq New” is the cutoff of the new, perfectly-scaled FI filter. You can only engage either one or the other. Switching has to be done by the Vintage one though. Set its slider to “off” and it will engage the New one; turn it up and it disables the new one. After reading the manual again, it appears that the number that “freq new” is set to corresponds to the MIDI note number of the same value. That is to say, each increase of 1 corresponds to a semitone. Note 36 (min) is C (65.4Hz), note 122 (max) is D (9397.27Hz). ”Freq 2nd” is the cutoff off a second (bandpass) filter running in parallel. Turning its slider up engages it. You can then space the two filters to create dual-peak, vocal formant- type sounds. An increment increase of 1 provides a one-semitone offset from the main filter. Oddly, this second filter still reacts to envelopes and LFO even if you turn off the main filter with the dial in the top right of the screen. This can yield some interesting results.  In the VCF/ENVELOPE section, “attack” sets how quickly the filter(s) open(s) from cutoff to maximum. “Decay” sets how quickly the filter(s) close(s) from maximum back to the cutoff point. Back to the VCF/MODULATION section, “AD” sets how much the VCF AD envelope will affect the filter cutoff - higher values will open the filter further. “Env. Follower” sets how much your plucking dynamics (bass’s volume envelope) will affect the filter cutoff - again higher values cause the filter to open further. You need to be judicious in balancing the “AD” and “Env. follower” sliders in the above section. If you want a regular, always-the-same-shape, keyboard-style envelope then only use the AD slider. Adding too much of the envelope follower can override the shape of the AD envelope you’ve chosen. A bass’s volume envelope has a reasonably quick rise to maximum and then a longish decay as the note dies out. If you’re trying to program a slow upward filter sweep on the AD, the envelope follower will swamp that. Likewise, if you’re trying to program a very snappy decay on the AD (like acid-type bass sounds), the long decay of the bass’s volume envelope will ruin that if you apply too much envelope follower. “Resonance” controls how much a portion of the signal is fed back into the filter. This boosts the frequencies around the selected cutoff point, thus creating a resonant peak. Turning the resonance to maximum on 24dB mode will cause the filter to self-oscillate, yielding a pure sine wave oscillator. When using a bass guitar, you’ll need to have “bass” turned up in the VCF INPUT section (it needs a trigger and pitch reference). It probably works better when plugging in a keyboard instead as you’ll probably be able to hear just the sine wave. It doesn’t seem to behave at all like it does on analogue synths - changing the cutoff didn’t really enable me to tune it very well. Weirdly it seems to be best in tune when the “freq. vintage” was set to 0. After reading the manual it looks like the new filter will behave correctly (see above under explanation of “freq new”). I’ll have another go and update this page accordingly. The “Slope” knob switches between a 2-pole (12dB per octave) slope and 4-pole (24dB per octave) slope. The latter cuts off the higher frequencies above the cutoff point more rapidly than the former. LFO can be used to control the filter, either on its own or in conjunction with the envelope(s). (LFO can also be used to modulate the oscillators’ pitch.) I like that it has a delay slider too so that the LFO fades in over time. I’ve used that on one of the patches I shared. The LFO can be controlled by MIDI CC #1 and so a foot pedal can be used to bring modulation in and out as desired. What is really cool is that the noise has its own AD envelope (next to the VCF AD envelope sliders). This means you can program a short burst of noise to create a percussive attack even when you’ve programmed a long decaying filter sweep. (Normally noise just goes through the same filter as the other sources so that if you program a long decaying filter sweep, you can hear the noise all the way through. On the FI, you can get the noise to just be present right at the moment of attack and quickly disappear, or conversely, have it silent at the start and then slowly fade in.) I’ve finally figured out how the harmoniser section works! It’s part of the distortion circuit. You need to turn up the “distortion” slider in the INPUT section and (at least one of) the voices in the MIXER section (next to HARMONIZER) in order to hear it. One oddity I’ve found with the FI is as follows: if you’ve edited and saved any of your patch parameters on the actual pedal and you subsequently load new patches into those slots, then the new patches will take on those tweaked values. If that’s not clear what I mean: on the pedal a parameter setting of 5 is the default, i.e. if all parameters are set to 5, the patch will sound exactly like it did when you created it in the editor. Say you make an edit to a patch on the pedal and set its resonance to 9 and save the change by clicking the edit knob; when you load a new patch into that slot, its resonance will be set to 9 also. I realised this quirk when my first patch sounded nothing like it should have sounded. Luckily, setting each parameter back to 5 sorts it out. You can do this for all patches at once from one of the power-on menu settings. EDIT - this was a bug and has been addressed. __________________________________________ Patch transferring Here’s a little pointer that is an answer to a query about how to actually load patches on to the pedal. I know a few people have struggled with this. This is a cut and paste of a reply I wrote on TB: You need to find out which patches you want to load onto the pedal and which slot number in the pedal you want to have it. If you just want to replace one individual patch with another then first find a patch on the pedal that you want to overwrite. Then find the file on your PC of the patch you wish to write to the pedal. Rename this file so that it starts with the two-digit prefix of the slot into which you wish to load it. Open the renamed file again via the editor then click “write single file to pedal” and it will get loaded into that slot. If you want to load multiple files at once onto the pedal then it’s best to create a folder, copy in the PC files you want to load onto the pedal. Then rename each file with the slot numbers you want them to go, choose that folder via the editor then click “write all”. Any blanks will be skipped over and left untouched in the pedal. I’ve gone a step further and have all patches I like in one folder (unnumbered). I then have a different folder into which I placed the 99 patches I want on my pedal at any given time and I number these with the two-digit prefix and write these all at once. If ever I swap any out, I delete the old file from this folder, add the new file and number it and then write all again. Or you could simply have one big folder with all patches you like and then just number the 99 that you want and click write all. Any unnumbered patches will be ignored in the write process. ______________________________________ Patch sharing: (I’ll see if I can create a shared drive like the one on Talkbass) My patches: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1C7ZYqsyXkyNuasuuwLrQlICboSsGfXMp TB shared patches (including mine): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zto20lpne0dnent/AAC6W_8BHeYLrBTjkcoJBzCza?dl=0 __________________________________________ Latest firmware: http://pandamidi.com/support __________________________________________ My v3 sound clips: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1u2-dJaWdaAbPDnDdWkipu-P7IH_GHLQ2

Even though I sold mine I still think it isn’t a bad pedal. It’s very quick to dial in useable sounds. The onboard voices weren’t as pleasing as in other pedals (there are nicer sounding octave up and down voices out there) but the concept is great and I’ve struggled to find other pedals that use a triggered envelope (with a couple of recent exceptions (FI and Enzo). It could definitely be improved if the sweep were able to go in both directions within any given setting rather than just either up or down. Presets would also be a boon. In fact, EHX currently have a slider-based pedal which does indeed have presets so maybe...

Another Sheffielder! We are legion, it would seem. I recognised that carpet.

Thanks, @Al Krow. I’ve uploaded these to the shared patch thread on TB for all to access. I’ll add to it as I create more. https://www.talkbass.com/threads/future-impact-patch-sharing-thread.1199372/

I’m a big Chris Potter fan so this was a double-threat record. His solo on West of Hollywood is fantastic.

I bought James’s Future Impact on Saturday. He posted it within about an hour of my paying him and it duly arrived as expected. It was well-packed (and hence survived the heavy-handed treatment it received in transit) and works as it should. Clear, prompt and friendly communication throughout and a pleasure to deal with. I’d have no hesitations in recommending James to others or in dealing with him again. Many thanks!

The G2M sucked for me, even when playing straight into a hardware synth. Just too much latency. Industrial Radio is the lowest latency possible. The Imprint software takes the string energy information and imprints it into the MIDI signals so that one gets a more nuanced and bass-guitar-like feel, though this needs to be done via something like Ableton Live. I’m still considering going down this route. There’s the Meris Enzo which sounds good but I haven’t tried. Envelope options are a bit limited but seems capable of some great sounds and is polyphonic. I didn’t like the Boss SY-300. The oscillators sounded a bit crap and editing was a pain on the tiny screen. Octavius Squeezer sounds fantastic. Rare, though there’s a used one on eBay right now. Editing is pretty cumbersome to say the least though. The Future Impact is very good. I just bought one after renting one last year. It’s much better than I remember. Perhaps tracking is better on my Precision bass (I only tried it with a Sterling and Jazz last time). Some patches track better than others but it’s pretty satisfying. Patch creation has to be done on a PC or Mac and loaded onto the pedal. One can coarsely (settings of 1-9) tweak a few parameters of any given on the pedal itself; these are attack, decay, envelope depth, dynamics (envelope follower sensitivity), filter cutoff, resonance, balance (between synth and bass), level and effect level. I’d still recommend buying a synth too though. There are some great and cheap analogue synths our there for under £400, some under £200. Check out Novation Bass Station II, Korg Monologue and Minilogue, ARP Odyssey, Behringer Model D, Roland SE-02. A used Moog Sub Phatty or Little/Slim Phatty can be had in the same price bracket. I’m still getting some great synth-type sounds from my Octabvre, Mastotron, Manta and Enigma together. Also, Source Audio are working on a pair of pedals which cover octave, filter and synth oscillators and that ought to be pretty good.