radiophonic

There's a huge Octaver thread on here somewhere... I've owned a Sub 'N' Up but I found the latency to be a deal breaker. It does track well though and there are a lot of fine tuning options. I couldn't get it sound like an OC2 though. I have a Boss PS6, which has it's own limitations but superior latency IME. If you want that fat analog sound, there really isn't a digital option that I've heard that does it convincingly.  I don't think the Nether sounded anything like an OC2 either. I had an Emma Okto Nojs which was in the right ballpark, but in the end a s/h Boss OC2 was the answer for me. There is a volume drop, but that's a common problem - unity gain will be perceived as quiet thanks to how the human brain processes low frequencies. Valeton do an OC10 that few people rate highly for cheap. It really depends on whether you want/need polyphonic tracking and whether you are after a detuned bass sound or a sythy sine-wavy type of thing. 

Temporary board following the highly inconvenient demise of my ES-5 loop switcher. Hopefully Roland get their skates on. No MIDI, no parallel routing or clean blend and one song will be unplayable.  It is smaller and lighter though.

15 hours ago, ironkerton said:

Oh yes - both can be true! Most of my band are or have been techies, when things are bad it's 95% this attitude and only 5% where the problem is the techies! 

We played a god awful festival once where we went on stage SEVEN HOURS late and they asked us to cut our set from 40 mins to 3 songs. Before we went on, our singer asked the techie who we'd spent all night with "are you gonna cut us if we play on?" - he laughed and shook his head. We played on ha ha 

Sometimes that works to your advantage. One band I played with in the early 90s did a hippy festival in rural Norfolk. The techies were so out of it that we went on 5 hours late, which bagged us a 10.30pm Saturday slot in front of a suitably intoxicated, large and appreciative crowd. We didn't cut our set either.

It looks very impressive and it's clear that this and the C4 are likely to compete. The tracking appears to be incredibly solid.  I'm going to wait for the C4 I think and do a more detailed comparison. Provided the sounds and tracking are in the same park, then the MIDI control would swing it. If the Boss had even a couple of presets, I'd be more interested but 11 position switches under stage lights seems like trouble to me.  Plus I have other source gear, meaning that the expression control wouldn't integrate well into my existing board. Probably great in the studio though. Boss do seem to be killing again these days.

The selling point of the Scrutator is the expression pedal control of all the parameters and the 2-pole filter. Plus it has a preamp. I'd really like to compare it to the Frantabit though- any pedal that offers an 'obliterate' option has to be worth a look. I notice there's one in the classifieds, but alas I am skint.

Shellac / The End of Radio (BBC Sessions). Now that is a bass bass sound. 

On 24/06/2019 at 08:44, Leonard Smalls said:

Quick photo from our recent Hereford gig highlighting special trousers...

 

That's a good shot. It took me a second loo to work out what the guy on the right was playing before realising the angle of the shot was across the band rather than through it. Personally, I wouldn't wear those trousers, but the I do have t-shirt.

6 hours ago, Dosi Y'Anarchy said:

The Chunk Systems Brown Dog is excellent but quite rare and not cheap now if you can find one.

The Fairfield Circuitry Unpleasant Suprise is great but although it does do the gated thing excellently, I felt it was more of a "noise" fuzz rather than a synth fuzz, if that makes any sense? I did a video where I used it a bit But didn't have the gate set high. It's here if you're interested:

 

I've had a few mastotrons but always felt they benefitted from a clean blend as I couldn't get them to balance in a mix otherwise.

The little bear bs-1 is a woolly mammoth clone that is pretty cheap but I quite enjoyed for the time I had it. 

The Redwitch Zeus was great as quite tweakable when you consider the trim pots. But as you already have the ON, I don't know if there's any point to having a functionally similar pedal

That was quite informative. II thought it sounded synthier without the amp sim. All the harmonics were in the top end. Maybe not a good choice. I agree about the Mastotron too - I always run mine with a clean blend for everything except synth and the it has an OC2 in parallel. Clean blend has opened up a lot of pedals to me for bass.

13 hours ago, GisserD said:

Tried a factory reset? 

It's the 'Enter' switch that's glitching, so I can't do a reset. I'm talking to Roland.

1 hour ago, Quatschmacher said:

I know of a Zeus for £100. Let me know if you are interested and I can send you the details. 

My ES5 has developed a fault so I'm in no-spend limbo until I've worked out what the issue is...

20 hours ago, GisserD said:

There's a Redwitch fuzz god 2 on ebay going cheap.... 

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F283511406327

Boo. Blinked and I missed it.

Diabolik and P&C look promising I must say. Both are still actually available too, although not cheap. The P&C is in the same ballpark as I'm expecting the new Source Audio C4 to be, which seems anomalous. I guess they have to ship from NZ though. I spent some time tweaking last night and found that I got better results with the Mastotron if I disengaged the subs and let the OC2 do all the work. Nice results with the 3 voice harmony on the PS6 and now my DD500 is working as a digital octave down and a detune chorus, I don't have to worry about changing modes under stage lighting either.  I've got a couple of months of getting sounds together while we prep the next album and before we resume gigging and I'm hoping the C4 is out soon so I can decide whether to stay on the fuzz path or jump into a digital solution. 

I'd love an Oxide. but I've never had the $$$ when one came up. The Zeus looks very interesting - similar to the Okto Nojs but with control of the gate.  The octave sounds very OC2.

4 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

Run it into a gate pedal such as TC Sentry, that’s what I did. I set up a toneprint which has an instant cutoff. 

Does the external gate approach work? I associate gating in a fuzz with starving the cathode, which would add a lot of randomness of the probability of a note being sustained at a given frequency. I'd assumed a noise gate would be too smooth. I don't really have room for a gate pedal anyway, but I'm curious.

What are people using? Historically I've had the Okto Nojs, which includes a pretty unique fuzz-half. I've no idea what it's based on but it has quite a rich, almost nasal mid range. Unfortunately you can't adjust the gate, so I always needed a second fuzz for routine heaviness. The solution was the ZVex Mastotron, but it's very dry and I always found it benefited from  a blend with the ON when doing the filter-synth thing. Now I have an OC2, so the ON is off the board and I'm looking for alternatives.  Nothing Muff related, needs to have an adjustable gate tonally distinct from the Mastotron.  Unpleasant Surprise is on my radar as an oddball. Fuzzrocious Blast Furnace is a possibility too. Anything else I should be considering. Ideally something I can actually buy...

3 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

I’ve managed a very MF101 patch on my FI and will share later.

Awesome! I look forward to it.

I'm bumping this for reasons of self interest. I need help. Since I can control the Manta using MIDI, I can run in 'post-ES5' and save myself a loop for my new EQ pedal. Thisi s a big advantage over a Moog MF101.  The catch is that try as I might, I can't get the Manta to sound close enough to the Moog. I'm just trying to get a smooth 4 pole sweep with the cut-off controlled by an expression pedal, which out to be straightforward I'd have thought. On the Moog, I set the minimum cutoff to about 50Hz, resonance ~ 7, mix 10 and 'amount' which I think is a sensitivity control for the envelope follower. Is there something obvious that I need to account for with the Manta? Part of it may be in the interaction between the envelope follower and the expression control I guess - since it's either/or on the Manta whereas the Moog is set manually. It feels more like the resonance though, the Moog can self oscillate wildly, but adds a lovely tone to the mwaaah, as you sweep the cutoff, whereas the Manta sound very hard to me. Lots of Manta users on there judging by the pedalboard thread, so what your approach to getting the big fat sweeping mwah. For context, the input source is either Mastotron/OC2 in parallel or Okto Nojs or a combination of the ON and the Mastotron, again in parallel.

This is more or less my current board.  I've already swapped out the Manta for an MF101. 

The OC2 is new and I’m still A/Bing it with the Okto Nojs. The ON is very good for synth stuff and a bit fatter sounding but OC2 just has that hollow slightly resonant thing going on that makes it a win when played solo. I doubt I’d notice the difference with a fuzz going on though and the Nojs side sounds unlike any other fuzz I’ve played. I certainly can’t get close with the Mastotron, but it lacks a gate control. I have a Source Audio eq pedal in the post and part of the reason is with the idea of boosting the OC2 when running it in parallel. 

Edit. The OC2 really is quite low output in pure Oct 1 mode. I'm definitely going to need the boost. However, if the signal is balanced with the Mastotron, it's a great synth engine and despite all the online griping about tracking, I don't think its notably worse than the Okto Nojs provided you don't go below about A. It hangs onto the note longer than the Mastotron does with the gating set tight anyway.  I'm starting to wish I had more loops... this is getting out of hand.

10 hours ago, BassThing said:

No, it's not the BF-2B, it's the purple guitar one. I tend to use either my MXR M117R or an old Aria flanger on my bass.

I get it. The BF2B was supposed to low pass the fundamentals and only flange the top end. It was pretty innovative really and it was probably fine on a passive bass but the buffer really reacted badly to my stingray. Sounded great on guitar though.  I assume this is something Boss realised at some point because, modern Boss pedals don't have this issue at all IME.  I expect similar issues with the OC2, so I'm planning on running an EQ pedal ahead of it to drop the input level and dial back the frequency extremes if needed. I can then boost the overall signal back to unity later in the chain via my ES-5. 

2 hours ago, BassThing said:

My Boss BF-2 is an ACA type, however the 9v daisy chaining does not work with it (strictly speaking, I've tried it with common ground 9v outputs on my Mooer Macro Power S8 PSU rather than an actual daisy chain cable) so I just use the isolated 12v output on the PSU instead.

Is that the old brown/gold one? I used to have one of those. It didn't like the impedance of an active bass - although in pre-internet days all I knew was that it sucked the low end in bypass. A guitar player vanished with mine. 12v is doable but a bit of an annoyance. 

That all looks fairly straightforward. I've got a Source Audio EQ coming a the same time and I'm trying to avoid the need to upgrade my PSU. The OC2 will displace an Okto Nojs, which is already daiychained, so fingers crossed.

Cool. Hopefully the daisy chain thing works. I'm a bit short on outlets and running one at 12v would be annoying since it would have to be dedicated.  

I've just bought a 1980s OC2 on ebay. It has the 'Use ACA supply only' sticker on the back. I use a One Spot CS7 supply that will deliver regulated and isolated 9 or 12v per outlet and I also daisy chain a couple of the low current analog pedals. My understanding is that the old ACA pedals were unregulated and that the original supply would deliver up to about 14v, depending on the demand and that a modern 9v supply is not recommended. I've also read that (for some reason) if you daisy chain the OC2 (why? something to do with a common earth maybe?), it's happy with a regulated 9v supply. Since I don't want to risk blowing anything, what's the recommended solution? 12v regulated or 9v daisy chain? 

The floor of our last practice. Mine is the one at the front.

https://www.instagram.com/p/ByGfRIugrN3/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

8 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

Mastering is as much as about making a set of tracks sound like a coherent whole as it is about making an individual track sound good. Decisions made when mastering a single track may not be the same as those made when mastering the same track in combination with others. Bear that in mind as you may need to get you single track remastered when it becomes part of an album.

Yes, but fortunately, most places seem to offer a per track rate and an album rate so we should be able to soak up the cost if we decide to include the song on the album. There's a lot of material in play so it will depend what kind of theme emerges from what we have. Given the band's propensity for endless tweaking, it wouldn't surprise me if there is an album mix and and single mix anyway. Or even a completely different vocal performance.