Let's see your PEDAL BOARD!

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

I must admit I had such a fun, bespite not being able to control anything ahahahahahah

Cool stuff.

How would you say the unpredictability fed back into your playing? Did it make you want to play more or less?

[gila_crisis]

I must admit I had such a fun, bespite not being able to control anything ahahahahahah

Cool stuff.

How would you say the unpredictability fed back into your playing? Did it make you want to play more or less?

It depends, I programmed the patch so that the last part was really erratic, so triggering command randomly each 333ms up to 1second.
Otherwise the first parts were paces to be slower (the slowest being 20seconds), so in those case I would would just do some stuff or play a video from yoututbe for a while, untill I eard somechanges in the sound.

Also I had the mix knob on the looper set to FULLY WET. So I wasn't totally aware of the sounds I was feeeding in, you know... muscle memory style.

[Dowi]

so i put the entire setup together (sans the Cantrell wah which i seldom use due to space considerations and never having owned a wah before) and everything works. i'm pleased to say that the looping board worked perfectly as soon as i plugged it in, which is unprecedented...there's always at least one cable that goes bad. the layout seems to work well, though in the living room it's hard to get all the way to the Ditto on the far left.

i'm going to have to get some kind of seat and arrange the boards at 90° to each other so i can get to everything. this will require the ability to swivel or scoot so i can work to either side of the big board. i'm now going through a period of testing and tweaking, figuring out how to steer this ocean liner. i'm having trouble with the LM-2, which seems to insist on raising the noise floor during the quiet bits which ain't what a limiter is supposed to do. i've also been working on learning the 1440's various functions, with particular emphasis on the automatic fadeout. listening to it fade over a minute and a half is rather unearthly. i think i'm sorted on being able to do good edits with the loopers, but will practice a bunch more anyway so i get used to the whole setup.

this has also necessitated going through the other boards and resetting stuff that was OK on its own but sticks out in an enormous signal chain. i've been through the whole front-end board today and am pretty happy with it for now. went though the big board yesterday, but when i started doing stuff today some of the settings didn't work for me, so i need to go back through that stuff again.

but the big thing is that at long last i appear to actually have the setup sorted i've been developing for about 12 years. there are things that could be better--i still haven't found the buzzsaw fuzz i hear in my head and the perfect tremolo continues to elude me--but i can boogie with this for now. Moog expression pedal for Randy's Revenge incoming.

i now have more pedals in my setup than all three guitarists in Slowdive combined LOL.

everything everything.jpg

a festive shot for the holiday season. should have turned everything on.

christmas board.jpg

Hey dubz, this setup takes some serious planning ahead but i really like It. Do you always play starting from scratch or have some pre record loops? Probably you already mentioned It but i haven't been very active lately.
Randy's + exp pedal Is a good choice. Actually in general ring mods+ some kind of freq movimento are always a good choice.

@Joel: i listened to the session yesterday, It sounds actually more organic than i expected considering everything.

[dubkitty]

Do you always play starting from scratch or have some pre record loops?

when i first started working up the multiple-loopers concept around 2008-09 i was using an E2 Headrush and either a TC Flashback in LOOP mode or later my first Ditto x2. i had an hour's worth of more-or-less prepared material, ranging from concepts ("Three Themes By Buffalo Springfield") to a worked-out piece that slowly built up in a pre-determined structure and a piece that had a head written out on staff paper. all that stuff got lost when my world collapsed in 2011-12. everything on my Soundcloud page (which i realized i should link in my footer: https://soundcloud.com/dubkitteh-1/sets ... ks-2012-14) was done in 2012-14 and was improvised into a E2 Headrush; one track ("portneuf [version]") is me playing lead over the "portneuf" loop which also appears on the page. my current plan is to start out improvising and then accrete sequences of material as i go that can either be reproduced by building them live which i love doing, or by playing pre-recorded loops from the 1440 which has 20 memory slots. once i feel like i can go for 60 to 90 minutes and be consistently coherent and interesting i'll start hunting around for places to play, but that's not essential to me doing it. i don't intend to depend on prepared material for the most part; i have an aesthetic about this that includes only using guitars and effects pedals and pulling things out of the air whenever possible. the whole point for me is the aleatoric/heuristic aspect...that's what makes it more interesting than playing boring old songs in a boring old band. the whole idea behind using the 1440 is for it to serve as the equivalent of the tape loops Robert Fripp used on the concerts in 1975 with Brian Eno and the 1979 solo Frippertronics tour which i saw in a record store at a shopping center in Berwyn, IL (just outside of Chicago). looking back, that performance had a huge influence on how i think about guitar, constructing forms out of thin air, and the notion (which first started for me when Hendrix hit the radio) of guitar-as-sound-source rather than as a conventional note generator.

[le lambin]

Sorry for the huge pics I can’t crack the ILF code for embedding images in my posts.

This is sort of just my home setup right now- it’s not practical or giggable but it has everything I like to play available plugged in and ready to go.

Guitar and bass go through all the pedals on the floor and on the top shelf, then into one EDP and into a guitar amp. The Digitakt goes into the second EDP and into some monitors. The two EDPs are controlled by the FCB1010 and are synced together. Sometimes Digitakt is slaved to EDP 2 which is kind of cool- the EDP determines the BPM and the digitakt follows along, so I can noodle and then sync a drum track to it regardless of what BPM I recorded the loop at. There is one big issue though, which requires a MIDI multiplier/divider to sort, and I’m not going down that road right now, so it’s not midi synced currently. I just finger drum shit into the EDP, which is using like 0.1% of the Digitakt’s capabilities, but whatever!

iPad is controlled by keystep and goes into the Cosmos. I gushed about this thing on another thread- it sounds cool. Cosmos goes into monitors too.I am really liking the Audiokit FM synth lately.

The EHX 95000 has nothing plugged in- I use it as a sampler kind of. I record six loops of ambient or noise or whatever ahead of time and then “play” it by mixing tracks in and out- kind of like tape loops on a four track, but it’s digital and I can save long loops. It’s perfect for transitions, or entire songs really. The memory card space is huge so I can store a bunch of songs on there. It’s great for this application.

Anyway, I almost never use everything all at the same time- it’s more just a way to have everything ready to go. I would never be able to perform with this much shit- I’d have no idea what to do next.

[dubkitty]

i would imagine so. i'm not even sure i'd know where to start.

i looked at some Cosmos demos and it's very unlike the way i think of looping. i've always viewed loopers as high-tech tape recorders that recycle the effected stuff i send into the loops. actually processing the loops after they're recorded is another whole level of shit i'm definitely not ready for. i already have too many decisions to make before i even turn on the looper.

i was getting kind of bummed by my seeming inability to find ways to get started on a loop sequence because i'm confused by the complexity of my full setup. but then yesterday i happened on a cool combination where i ran through the Attack Decay, 3699 fuzz, flanger, squarewave trem, and the tape echo setting on the Canyon and got some good grungy synth-esque bits. i have to remember that the idea is to play interesting shit first and then turn on the looper. it's been so long since i've done this seriously that i'm going back to my old loops and analysing them, going "how did you do that? OK, that's where the flanger comes in" etc. i also have to remember not to get too busy too quickly or it'll just sound cluttered. at this point i expect it'll take me until February to really feel comfortable with everything together, which it's still not since i'm waiting on the power supply 1-to-2 splitter so i can run the wah and tuner off the same 9V port because all 16 seats in the lifeboat are now occupied. thank god the flanger runs on AC power. i want to experiment with using the wah as a bandpass filter/tone control.

[cosmicevan]

Sorry for the huge pics I can’t crack the ILF code for embedding images in my posts.

This is sort of just my home setup right now- it’s not practical or giggable but it has everything I like to play available plugged in and ready to go.

Guitar and bass go through all the pedals on the floor and on the top shelf, then into one EDP and into a guitar amp. The Digitakt goes into the second EDP and into some monitors. The two EDPs are controlled by the FCB1010 and are synced together. Sometimes Digitakt is slaved to EDP 2 which is kind of cool- the EDP determines the BPM and the digitakt follows along, so I can noodle and then sync a drum track to it regardless of what BPM I recorded the loop at. There is one big issue though, which requires a MIDI multiplier/divider to sort, and I’m not going down that road right now, so it’s not midi synced currently. I just finger drum shit into the EDP, which is using like 0.1% of the Digitakt’s capabilities, but whatever!

iPad is controlled by keystep and goes into the Cosmos. I gushed about this thing on another thread- it sounds cool. Cosmos goes into monitors too.I am really liking the Audiokit FM synth lately.

The EHX 95000 has nothing plugged in- I use it as a sampler kind of. I record six loops of ambient or noise or whatever ahead of time and then “play” it by mixing tracks in and out- kind of like tape loops on a four track, but it’s digital and I can save long loops. It’s perfect for transitions, or entire songs really. The memory card space is huge so I can store a bunch of songs on there. It’s great for this application.

Anyway, I almost never use everything all at the same time- it’s more just a way to have everything ready to go. I would never be able to perform with this much shit- I’d have no idea what to do next.

Super cool. I used to do the 2 loopers for the FCB1010. The FCB1010 is the only thing Behringer ever made that was actually cool. I went the Repeater route, but damn sweet setup!

[dubkitty]

i've been narrating the continuing tale of tweaking my pedalboards into shape in the Gasaholics thread, but it occurred to me it would probably be better to do that here. i have all kinds of stuff going on, but the most recent serious thing to deal with was problems with my front-end board (aka "pre-processing board"...i call it the FEB because it's, well, at the front end of the signal path before the main board). this wound up being conceptualized around an EHX Attack Decay i got as an ILFSS gift and the octave box (since upgraded) i use for bass content on the loops. the most recent version went guitar->Foxrox Octron octave divider->EHX Attack Delay w/Moog EP-3 expression pedal->AD effects loop SEND->Ibanez LF7 Lo Fi->Zvex Instant Lo-Fi Junky->Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water->AD effects loop RETURN->enveloped signal to Boss RV-3. the idea was to degrade and antique the signal before it went into the main board. however, i discovered a big problem.

when all 3 boards were hooked up together, something on the FEB was putting out some kind of EF interference that was so bad that it bled into the signal going to the fuzzes on the big board and made them about twice as noisy as without the FEB send even when everything on the FEB was turned off. this was a serious problem, so i had to diagnose and fix it. i made up a whole list of potential causes ranging from obvious to obscure and started going through the questions. first was a fairly inconsequential fix; i'd neglected to pay attention to the mA ratings on the power supply and thus the AD was seriously underpowered. so i made a list of everything on there by current draw in mA and rearranged the power outs so the 400 mA outs went to the AD and the RV-3 and the 200 and 100 mA outs got successively less needy pedals.

this didn't touch the main problem though, which was that two boxes--the Lo Fi and the Zvex Instant Lo-Fi Junky--were very noisy even when they were powered by separate 9V wall warts which eliminated the power supply being the issue. i suspected the Zvex because to my recollection it had always been noisy to the point of being irritating, and when i pulled it entirely off the board and ran it off a 9V adapter with nothing else between the guitar and amp it was horrendously noisy all on its own. so that had to go. once i got that off the LF7 was OK, a bit of hiss but nothing unusual for a gain-adjacent box. so now there was a rearrangement issue because the way stuff was laid out wasn't exactly optimal, and also the question of what to replace the Zvex with. i decided to pull the RV-3 and replace it with a EXH Stereo Memory Man w/Hazarai that this year's ILFSS brought me. so far everything appears to be working fine, though i haven't run the entire 3-board setup to be sure the big board's fuzzes are OK now. i spent a bunch of time setting up presets for the AD because without presets it forgets the expression pedal sweep settings, so now there's a general-use preset with my preferred EP sweep, a continuous-triggered wonky tremolo effect i can control for speed with the EP, and a preset similar to preset 1 but with the onboard "Harmonix" fuzz, a kind of Muff-ish severe distortion effect, added. i also fine-tuned the LF7 for the right kind of crispiness. i still have to figure out the SMMH other than obvious surface-level stuff but i'm confident there's some good stuff in there. the LF7 might get replaced by a filter pedal i saw Megan the shoegaze girl demo that's really great, but i'm trying not to buy things that aren't strictly necessary for now because i have several equipment needs and a bunch of medical bills to cope with. so this is what i wound up with. if i was feeling ambitious i might stick my GEB-7 EQ in there, but i don't think there's room now. so here's what i've got on the FEB today.

FEB 12-28-23.jpg (130.14 KiB) Viewed 2308 times

compared to the old FEB; this was before i had to replace the power supply because the Shallow Water doesn't get along with MXR power supplies per the folks at FC. yeah, noise has been a FEB problem from the beginning.

[behndy]

sooooo.... i have NEVER figured out how to get pictures to fit on ILF posts. i always put up clickable links but... how do?

anyhoo. the bigger board i had was too much man. i want am much more streamlined bass noodling experience. so. downsize. then with the little amp alcove i have in my room.




signal chain is in to the Infinity, out 01 -> Mood -> Diabolik, out 02 -> TAFM. those go into 01 and 02 on the H9, H9 stereo out into Nuenaber. simple, but lets me record two fuzzes with/without modulation, or if i'm paying attention bass modulated and bass clean at the same time.

[le lambin]

i decided to pull the RV-3 and replace it with a EXH Stereo Memory Man w/Hazarai that this year's ILFSS brought me.

There should be an entire thread dedicated to that pedal- one of the GOATs in the EHX lineup, IMO.

sooooo.... i have NEVER figured out how to get pictures to fit on ILF posts. i always put up clickable links but... how do?

anyhoo. the bigger board i had was too much man. i want am much more streamlined bass noodling experience. so. downsize. then with the little amp alcove i have in my room.




signal chain is in to the Infinity, out 01 -> Mood -> Diabolik, out 02 -> TAFM. those go into 01 and 02 on the H9, H9 stereo out into Nuenaber. simple, but lets me record two fuzzes with/without modulation, or if i'm paying attention bass modulated and bass clean at the same time.

That TAFM is awesome. Nice to see someone using the diabolik! Malekko dirt boxes are always really cool

[behndy]

mannnnnnnnn i try not to even think about how many neat pedals (and finishes on pedals) i had back in the day. hurts my heart butts. was super happy to find a TAFM with a cute little pinkie cover.

and YES. Diabolik is so grimy. another beautifully designed box. i am super partial to pink things.

thanks!

[PanicProne]

WOW the boards in this thread! Merry xmas to me! :P

[behndy]

murrrrrrrrrr... so. been awhile since i DELVED into the intricacies of power and noise and such. i have this on my desk (waiting on that CHROMA) -



https://www.modulargrid.net/p/racks/view/2409693

and i'm using a Cioks DC7 for power, but. alas. there are 9 things. don't really want to spend another $250 on another one (have another one on my bass board, love those things but... yeah. monies.). was going to use a pair of Joyo pedal adapters, but they do come with a daisy chain. would it be a bad idea to put the DBA feedback loop and the Chase MIDI Box on the same PSU? i might be able to fit two, but it's getting a bit tight under my desk stand that the pedals sit on.

boop?

[dubkitty]

sooooo.... i have NEVER figured out how to get pictures to fit on ILF posts. i always put up clickable links but... how do?

step 1: open your photo in a pixel art editing program. Paint 3D works fine.

step 2: resize the photograph to no more than 700 px on its long axis (in Paint select Canvas, Resize Canvas to 700 px on its longest side with the "lock aspect ratio" and "resize image with canvas" boxes checked) this will reduce the file size to where the ILF server can digest it. it will only accept photos of 700 x 700 px or less and smaller than a specific file size in mb that i don't recall because it's never been an issue for me.

step 3: go to the Upload Attachment tab below the text box you type your post in. it'll ask you to add a file. click the Choose File button, navigate to that photo file on your device, and click Add The File. once it uploads the filename will appear in Posted Attachments directly beneath the text box.

step 4: to place the photo at a particular spot in your text, put your cursor where you want the photo to appear and then click the Place Inline button under the listed attachment. this will insert a code string with the file name on the ILF server included at the point your cursor is located. click Preview to see if it looks right.

step 5: click Submit.

[edit: annoying typos, redundancies, phrasing]

[MSUsousaphone]

I never figured out JIFs.