bobbass4k

I only used EZ Drummer briefly but from what I remember of the tutorials they were really pushing using the VST interface, I seem to remember a slogan claiming that "you'll never need to use the piano roll again", which for me is not a selling point. I eventually settled on Superior Drummer 2 (also toontrack) which is exclusively focussed on the sounds. Like Douglas, I program parts in manually (keyboard/mouse) directly into the piano roll. This is just the most intuitive for me and lets me program very complex parts that I'd have no chance playing in on the midi controller. Like Douglas, I try to do eveything at DAW level and am very skeptical of VSTs that try to shackle you into them for basic functionallity. I'm not sure what you looked at before settling on EZDrummer but Addictive might be worth a look - it doesn't have the flexibility or sound library of Superior Drummer but it has loads of very useable presets that make it very easy to get going.

Newest build for recording some stuff with a few new DIY additions - Brief notes for the DIY ones - 1 - Schalltechnik pumpernickel - Compressor 2 - EQD Arpanoid clone - Arrpegiator 3 - EQD Life clone - Tweaked Rat with octave and boost 4 - Modded blueberry clone 5 - Moosapotamous Dirty Bird - Mad squelchy fuzz - like a prunes and custard but angrier and less useful 6 - VFE Triumvate - 3-band distortion 7 - Catalinbread SFT clone with mods - Cranked SVT sound 8 - SUNN Model T preamp clone 9 - DBA Space Ring clone with mods - Very angry ring modulator 10 - Frostwave funk-a-duck clone - Completely mad envelope filter 11 - mid-fi pitch pirate clone - Modded to switch between internal LFO and extermal CV 12 - Sequencer - Puts out sequenced CV for the pitch pirate and phaser 13 - Lovetone Doppelganger clone 14 - EQD Rainbow Machine clone 15 - DBA Echo Dream clone - Modded heavily so it actually works... 16 - Madbean Dreamtime - Unique multi-mode digital delay 17 - Reverb - Belton brick based very spacey reverb

Why has nobody asked about the picture of Tuvok? I wouldn't find it odd except that it seems to be positioned so you can lock eyes with him as you drum....

I'm far from an expert, though I've worked in 3 electronics companies buying heavily from China and the EU. China's and our trading relationship with the EU is apples and oranges. China/EU trade is facilitated by a colossal industry of brokers, middlemen and importers/exporters who deal with the bureaucracy. UK/rest of EU trade was much more direct, because it could be. Yes we've dealt with the rest of the world for years, but for the end consumer importing stuff from the rest of the world has been prohibitively expensive for all those years too. America, Australia, Japan etc. Places like thomann, gear4music and countless other businesses across all sectors were built around the assumption that this would never happen. For them, there is only damage control, and we as consumers are only ever going to have less than we did before. Also worth pointing out that yes, businesses trade with the rest of the world more than the EU but its 51.1% to 48.9% so we're still talking about basically half of the average companies business being affected.

Just under the wire (because I was hard at work, not because I forgot...) - a cover I've wanted to do for a long time and it has other destinations but I may as well confuse and annoy you all with it too. For me, the top tier in the steaming parfait of festering, toxic s**t that was 2020 was the return of Tim Smith (Cardiacs) to whatever plane of reality he came from. This is my anemic homage - Vocals, piano bit and other ideas by my girlfriend -- Elen McKeever Garay Wireless (Cardiacs)

Ahhh they´re CNC´d - I thought the small lettering looked very neat for an acid etch. What CNC setup are you using? It´s not something I´ve really considered before - but thinking about it it would make a lot of things easier and there seem t o be some cheapish diy options around.

That looks incredible - can i ask about your etching process? I've had mixed results with it, to paint the etch I usually mask off the empty space and spray paint the etched bits, then sand the whole thing with super fine paper - but I've found it difficult to get a deep enough etch that's also clean for that to work.

How dare you. It's also self-indulgent w***y jazz for hipsters. To be fair it probably has the same ratio of utter toss to good stuff as prog, but with less Rick Wakeman in a wizard's cloak. So I think we can all agree it has an edge.

Seen lightning bolt live three times in my life, each one louder than the last. Noise rock is about as useful a term as rock itself - it´s applied so liberally to bands that are so different to each other that it doesn´t hold much weight as a genre. Sonic youth, shellac, the jesus lizard, there´s far more digestable entries in the canon, and then something like the locust, which makes lighting bolt look like baby shark... Personally I´ve always thought of lightning bolt as a really really loud jazz band that get stuck in a 30 second time loop.

It´s important to understnd what a cab sim is - like baloney alludes to above, they´re basically just a really aggressive, specific EQ that emulates the response of the speaker cones. I have one (a DIY one) permanently in front of my interface. With straight clean tone, I can live without it, but it´s absolutely essential for using distortion (and other) pedals. Drive/Distortion pedals generate a lot of harsh high frequencies that the designers have assumed will be filtered or smoothed out by the amp/cab so will never sound as intended direct without a cab sim or aggressive EQíng. If you´re going to be mainly doing straight clean, I´d say a cab sim is optional, and like baloney says, there may be other (cheaper) ways to get the sound you´re after.

3 was maybe a little brighter to my ears than the other three, but all much of a muchness really. I quite liked 4 personally, not as a chorus sure, but as it´s own effect - like a phaser or dark, thick flanger without the usual hollowness and without much of an audible sweep. I´d quite like the answers too please.

Asymmetric clipping produces more odd harmonics, creating a slightly harsher, more dissonant tone. Symmetric will produce more even harmonics, not necceassirly smoother, but a more pleasent sound. In pratcice the difference can be kind of hard to notice when you´re doing hard clipping like here (diodes directly on the op-amp output). It´s more noticeable in soft clipping setups (in the feedback loop of the op-amp) like the tubescreamer.

Never a truer word spoken - I did a very rough estimate of how much I´ve spent building pedals over the years - it had 4 digits and the first was not 1...

Yeah - electrically it´s splitting the stereo jack out into two seperate outputs. With the "Bass" and "Treble" marking, it´s clearly intended for rics.

First things first - the power supply IS the same polarity as the SDRUM and the Zoom (generally called "tip negative" or "centre negative".) and WILL work with these two. The fact the plus and minus are the other way round on the symbol on the power supply is NOT important - the important information is which is which. The diiagram shows the centre pin (the solid black circle) and the sleeve (the semi circle). These are then labelled positive and negative, so THAT is the information you need too match. You can and will see these symbols both way round, what matters is if the solid black circle is connected to the minus or plus. The other two will also work but the explanation is a little longer - Boss pedals all use standard 9V tip negative 2.1mm connectors, like your power supply (it is also called "Boss style power" as they popularized it). This is the industry standard and most pedals use this. The problem with the Boss and Jamman is that the big companies will often tell you to use only their power supplies, but the manual will usually tell you even if the pedal itself doesn't - (the manual I found here confirms it is tip negative). So you're safe to use it on all four. Some extra advice though about current draw since I assume you'll be daisy chaining. Your pedals "draw" current from the power supply, when you're daisy chaining this means that you add up the current draws given on the pedal and the total has to be LESS than the current output of the supply. So your total current draw is 500mA (0.5A) + 500mA + 350mA (0.35A) + 70mA (RC-3, I looked it up) = 1.42A. So you're fine as this is well below the 3A of your supply, but if you add any other big digital pedals you'll need to be careful as these generally have big current draws.

Added some new builds to my dirt section - Brief annotations of the DIY ones - 1 - EQD Ghost Echo clone (Reverb) 2 - Madbean Dreamtime, FV-1 delay in a teeny tiny package - granular and tremolo modes in partiular are very useful. 3 - EQD Sea Machine Clone (Chorus) 4 - EQD Data Corrupter Clone with mods (Harmonizer/Synth Fuzz?) 5 - EQD Life Pedal Clone with mods - Octave Up into a Rat with a MOSFET boost at the end (boost can be switched off or used on it's own) 6 - Darkglass Microtubes clone with substantial mods (Overdrive). Took me a long time to get on board with this one but wit the right mods (and run at 18V) it can really sparkle. 7 - Catalinbread SFT clone with mods (itself an attempt to capture the SVT Vibe) - I've added a switch to lower the gain and the option to rub at 18V - makes a really good clean preamp at low gain. 8 - Lovetone Big Cheese Clone - Slightly modded to make the silly super gated mode even sillier. 9 - Moosapotamus Dirty Bird - Ridiculous chirping, quacky fuzz - kind of like a prunes and custard but waaaaaaaay weirder. 17 - Phase inverter 10 - DBA Echo Dream Clone - substantially modded to make it actually work properly.... 11 - Frostwave Funk-A-Duck Clone - Absolutely mad envelope filter, designed for synths I think. Takes a lot of patience, a lot of the knob settings will make no sound but if you treat it right... like no other filter I've ever had. 12 - DBA Space Ring Clone with mods (Ring Mod) - Built from the deadendfx PCB which makes a lot of useful improvements. 13 - Schalltechnik Pumpernickel Compressor 14 - Lovetone Doppelganger clone (Phaser/Vibe) - All the bells and whistles - had a smaller form factor clone of this but I sold it and missed it so much I didn't care that the only PCB i could get was for this masive version. 15 - Mid-Fi Pitch Pirate Deluxe Clone (Super Extreme Chorus) 16 - Step Sequencer - Puts out sequenced CV via 3.5mm cables to the control the pedals modded to take it, replacing their internal LFOs (Pitch Pirate and Doppelganger on this board)

Is there any blending happening amp side? If the sound is vanishing almost completely it sounds like a phase issue to me, but I'm not familiar enough with the amps to advise specifically.

I don't think a disregard for the rules and conventions neccesarily implies a lack of skill or knowledge, and to assume that the unique appeal of her appeals was essentially accidental seems a little unfair. After all, you can't break the rules if you don't know what they are... I know that was just a specific example but I've seen other designs with series/parallel caps, and there can be valid reasons for it. At the time she was around, the majority of boutique builders were regurgitating the same designs with token tweaks or gimmicky features, I don't really see how there's anymore skill or experience in changing a few caps in a big muff and calling it something else... For better or worse, her pedals stood out a mile at the time.

Effector 13 was the original name Devi used back in the early/mid 2000's. I think there was a brief period of crossover and maybe she kept the effector 13 name in Japan (where pedals are known as effectors) but she settled on the Devi Ever name in the late 2000's. Things get very complicated from there as she hit some financial trouble (that's a whoooooole other story) and licensed a lot of her more popular names and designs out to other companies - Dwarfcraft, INFANEM (who did a version of the improbability drive) and a couple of others I think. I didn't fully keep up with the rest but at some point she tried to get her names and designs back and had a public spat with Dwarfcraft, and got some but not all back. She started selling her own pedals again under the Fuzz Goddess name, but many without their original names. She can be a divisive figure in the pedal world - there's still a lot of animosity around the aformentioned financial trouble (it's a very long story but basically she took a lot of money for a kickstarter and didn't deliver) and if you asked this question over on talkbass you may get a very different explanation. Perosnally I think her designs were unique and sounded horrible in that very special way - others think she was an untrained hack who made abominations.

Enough filters for you? That thing´s a beast - how´s the wombtone, don´t see a lot of them around. I only had 10 minutes with a warped vinyl once but it was absolutely magical.

Farnell don't stock a big range of the right angle PCB pin ones unfortunately - a point of contention I raised with the guy responsible for them when I worked there, but to no avail... They're mainly of interest to the hobbyist (pedal hobbyists specifically) so they're hard to find at the big boys.

Has anyone got a good source of the right angled PCB pin 16mm pots? I never buy huge quantities so I usually just get them from bitsbox but I'm looking to stock up. They're cheap at rapid but they only have half the values I need. Can anyone vouch for an ebay seller?

He's looping everything through Ableton so the actual answer could be any number of very specific plugins. There's definitley an envelope filter and octave effects (up and down, maybe 2 down 1 up?) but yeah I also hear a pitch effect - sounds maybe like he's trying to emulate a fretless?

None more black. I like it.

An extremely rough phone clip I accidently recorded - some silly textural guitar stuff I was messing about with trying to find sounds that work through an amp. The phone clip is actually useful cos you can hear the guitar acoustically too. 20200809_012404.m4a