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What I mean is for example a dual pot with one half being a 100K linear and the other a 100K log. Or even better mixed values and tapers both. Are there any out there?

Obviously, one could change the wafers inside but these days I am lazy AF and just wanna give my money to someone.

Thanks!

Guitarist from my band has one and I offered to mod it for him, haven't built a pedal in a while ( :/ ) so that would be a small not so time-consuming high for me.

What's good that's out there, how to supercharge it and make it sound good? I am free to drill through the enclosure, so that's on the table as well.

Thanks!

Tried a TC Helix, not just that I think it's utter shit, it's also not stereo in a true way (or maybe I don't understand stereo very well, I am not kidding, this is totally possible).
I am after a phaser that's stereo and has two independent paths.

While we're at it - which pedals are there that have 2 independent paths?

The only one I know of is a Boss DD7 that can process two audio inputs separately without the two being summed into one common output. (actually summed to both stereo outputs, which is what the unfortunate Helix does for example)

[Using a mic to run your drummer's kit through your pedalboard]

So this time the topic is:

--- Using a mic to run your drummer's kit through your pedalboard ---

Looking for ideas and to learn from other people's experiences on this. I am a HUGE fan of Dub Trio so admittedly my desire to dabble in this stuff stems from there.

So, what I'd like to do is run a mic from my drummer's drum kit (or maybe one element of his kit, let's say the snare) and run it in or out of my pedals at will. I play dual mono (fake stereo?) and have two signal lines one being the main sound in amp A, and the other being a special effects (more in a sense that the lines I play through this are fillers with delay and some modulation, by special fx I don't think rain sounds or synth sounds or something) kinda sound that goes into amp B.

So I'd like to instantly (gradually would be better but I know this increases the complexity of the setup) be able to run that mic signal to my effects chain whenever I want while it would be muted otherwise. It would be nice if I could run both the guitar and that mic signal through the effects at the same time.

SO basically what I want to achieve from this is to capture some moments played on the drum kit and process them through huge reverbs and delays and distortion coming through my amp B and let them ring out when I disable the mic input (or switch it back to the guitar).

What kind of device would allow me to do this? Also, obviously, it would be great if the device could be smallest possible. Because REASONS... ya know?!



--- On commercially available semi-solutions: ---

I know that the guitarist of the aforementioned Dub Trio uses a Boss RC20XL for this (from what I could gather from super bad pics of his board that are available online) so what I am guessing he's doing is bending down, turning the MIC input pot from zero and up and then manipulates what comes out of the mic input with delays and verbs and then when he's done he turns the mic input on the RC20XL back to zero. This is my assumption but I don't know how he could be doing it otherwise.

I have a friend who uses a Korg Kaoss Pad for this kind of thing with great results, but this is not a "mic'd drums going through guitar pedals" scenario, he has to use the effects on the Kaoss Pad (which are great, lol).

I've looked into solutions like the Pigtronix Keymaster as well, and that just doesn't do what I need it to do, or I don't understand it very well.

There's also the new Cusack Pedal Cracker that looks interesting but that thing only accepts a mic input and not a guitar input as well. Bummer.

So I guess my problem could be summed like this - need advice on how to achieve mixing or instantly getting the mic signal in and out of my existing effects chain (so I don't want a separate pedal that only processes the mic signal (if I wanted that then the Cusack would be ideal)) without the need to bend down ideally.



--- On what I intend to do and need your help with guys ---

Whilst discussing this on reddit someone suggested me to use contact mics and that reaaaally pushed me into that direction, I don't know why I haven't used them before, they can do so much for my looping setup as well.
The cool thing about these is the effective "gate" you get cause if the drummer is not touching the element of the drum kit that the contact mic is attached to then there is no sound (obviously there will be some cause of the vibrations, but not a lot).

So in the end I settled to this kind of idea/setup:
- 3 contact mics, one for the snare, one for the hi-hat, one for the ride
- all of them going into a mixer that will preferably have individual channel volume controls
- the output fromt he mixer will go to a volume pedal
- from that volume pedal I enter one of my effect chains
- then I can gradually or momentarily infuse little moments of my drummer's playing into my rig and then manipulate that through huge reverbs and delays, maybe even loop that, etc



Do you guys know of a mixer project that would allow me to do this?
What kind of problems should I expect with this? Nothing is easy, so I am guessing there will be some.
I should note that I am not super concerned with the quality of the sound here, this is more an interesting gimmick that could potentially turn out well and interesting, I know that contact mics roll-off a lot of bass if you are not using an appropriate pre-amplifier but I am not concerned with that, if anything, that can only be a plus with what I want to do.

If ANYONE has read through all of this I salute you and owe you a beer.

Cheers and let me know your opinions!

P.S. The only reason the pictures are in this post is to prevent the tldr moment and to keep your brain going SOMEHOW, through all that is written.

Sounds amazing! Thank you Jon for a fantastic project and for all your help. I thank all of you for getting me through this build. I've had so many difficulties with this build, mainly to do with parts, so the build spanned through a couple of months but it's finally here!

This time I went for a bit more adventurous look with the faceplate, it's not 100% symetrical, lol, but I am not bothered by it. Since everybody always praises my ability to "etch" immediately after I post a build report, Imma just say it right away - noooo, it's not etched it's laser engraved by a local shop, I only do the design in Inkscape.

Jon, I don't know what kind of 1590Bs Banzai sells but the board got in comfortably, I do have it a bit to the side and not completely parallel to the enclosure but had the concetric pots been a bit lower it wouldn't have to stand like that. But yeah, you know how it is, it's always a balance between the positioning of the knobs and overall aesthetics and how you manage to pull it off inside.

I noticed ticking just this morning. So what I did was to wrap the entire output jack in copper adhesive tape and I wrapped a thick shielding cable inside the jack, that cable then went to the TH Custom Nope Relay little pcb so the output ended up being shielded throughout it's path through the enclosure. That solved it completely. Silent as it could be. I felt such relief.

That's it! I definitely needed some tremolo in my life. After some time I started distancing myself from the kinds of effects that overtake a guitar's sound completely and turned to effect types that build on top of what you already have and can be stacked together. So now I am into Univibe, vibrato, tremolo that sorta stuff. I used to be a major phaser guy, but now just find them to be too obscuring of the guitar sound, so what I like are the more mild variants like the PS-1A that I am still to fully debug although it's fully functional just distorts a little.

Cheers guys!

Hi guys, major taplfo problems here :/ My tap tempo cardinal is sitting on my bench for a month as I am unable to get the LFO part working at all. Jon has been a great sport and helped me a lot to try and debug it but we came to a conclusion that  my TAPLFO is simply not working so I bought another one (ouch!). And that one isn't working either.

Basically I've got this thing on my breadboard



cause I am trying to get the LFO working but it ain't happening. It just won't oscillate. I bought one from Banzai Music and the other one from Musikding, both are from Germany. I bought my crystal from Banzai too. Could it be the crystal?

Here are my voltages for the LFO pins (depth at max, all other controls half-way up):

2 - 2.17 V
3 - 2.39 V
4 - 5.02 V
5 - 0.51 V
6 - 2.19 V (someslight oscillation from 2.18 to 2.21 but that's probably my multimeter)
7 - 2.18 V
8 - 5.05 V

The other taplfo chip I received shows 0.03 on pins 6 and 7.

It's a total mess. I can't believe this. Any thoughts guys? I would really like to finish this and put it on my board :/ some other tests I could do? Is it possible that I got 2 dead-on-arrival taplfos? I can't be that unlucky. I did not abuse them, they should be in good operational condition.

Thank you for any help you might provide. Cheers.

Real estate on my looping board is tight and I wanna play slide more. That is all.
Thank you for suggesting a bitchin project for me to build

I just wanted to show you some of the things you can do with Caustic and a midi controller. This app is so powerful it melts my mind. The things that can be done, wow man.

Hi guys, I have recently recorded a song in rehearsal with my band, got 8 channels and mixed them together using my limited but somewhat existing knowledge of Cubase. It sounds pretty good to my ears, it should serve for band promo purposes so quality is not really the issue right now. But I have an issue with the end volume, it is so so much quieter than commercial music. I tried adjusting gain and there is some space to do that before clipping but still nowhere near enough.

What should I do? What are your preferred ways, either conceptually or in practice (which plugins) to handle this? I've read in some places that it all get's down to limiters and compressors in the end, and EQ of the bass content. But it's no use when I don't know where to begin!

I know there's lots of knowledgable people here so I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction. Thanks!

P.S. I should've explained the sort of music we do, because I reckon the approach to mixing and production varies wildly from genre to genre. We play alternative rock with fuzzed out guitars, strong drums, distorted bass and shouting vocals. So, yeah, it should, you know, sound loud haha.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B--6F_4JB7SYZTlCcU93MmhtT1k/view?usp=sharing

You can here how it sounds. It's in the rate of the rate of my Harbinger's LFO.

Now, this only happens when I am in the normal component values of the Klon (Sunking). I have a switch that takes me to a component change, the 390pf from the feedback loop gets changed with a 47pf. I've stumbled at this by accident and I can't live without that sound, it makes so much difference to me. Brian explained it best:



So, when in this mode (C8 = 47pF) I get oscilations and whine like on the soundclip. When not (c8=390pf) - I get no whine.

What I want is to somehow remedy this. Any ideas? I gotta resolve this, I just love using them together and I can't get away from the C8=47pf sound.

Help!

Probably a somewhat whacky way to start a topic, and my absolute apologies to guys who had probably experienced hearing loss or impediment at some point, but I frequently find myself thinking about this: how come that we still haven't come up with a way to provide complete silence via some gadget or something?

I mean hear me out. To me it looks like something that should be as standard as medicines sold in pharmacies. Imagine a gadget or liquid or whatever, that would give you complete silence, and complete rest. I don't have a newborn baby, that is not why I'm writing this but I often am in a situation where I would just love to be able to completely tune out without putting a restraint to someone's freedom, for example, when I get home from work I want to be able to rest and my GF wants to crank some music, and we live in a small apartment, so it's impossible for me to have some rest without reducing her freedom to crank the music up (she relaxes like that, I relax by...well relaxing, in a horizontal position haha). Then there's traffic, of course, then loudness coming from the neighbours (sometimes at 1 or 2 a.m. in an apartment above mine, right) so that frustrates me... and so on and so on. So many situations. So without having to reduce the freedom of others, without smashing the head of my inconsiderate neighbour with a sledgehammer, without...getting frustrated, wouldn't it be easier just to tune out and enjoy your peace?

This took a ranting route although my motivation for writing this hadn't been related to that haha. But seriously, wouldn't that be like the prefect product for a modern day man (and woman, obviously)?

What are the obstacles? I know there are so many smart people here, scientists even, so I would like your take on it. I posted a similar thing to Quora but got nowhere with it. I know that sound is about waves right, and a simple earbud is simply not gonna stop those, reduce maybe, but never entirely. And they can be uncomfortable to wear.

A silly topic if you will, but I'd love your take on it and whether or not you feel your life would be in any way bettered by being able to tune out completely whenever you want. Cheers!

http://www.guitarwank.com/podcast/

A wonderful podcast brought to us by some of the top cats in the blues/jazz/fusion guitarosphere - Scott Henderson and Bruce Forman. Not sure how widely popular these cats are on this forum, but personally I would cite Scott being my musical idol.
Bruce Forman is a legend, a dude who played with Dizzy Gillespie for example.

They talk about a variety of topics, and a lot of em has to do with tone and gear and all that. But a lot of it is just general music wisdom. Really some top-notch stuff in there. To the uninitiated - some bad jokes may run through - you'll have to live with it Scott can be very spitfiery and weird at times

There. I hope someone will be happy to hear about this as much as I've been since I've discovered it. Cheers!

This is the first PCB that I have "designed", had it populated a while ago, I keep forgetting about it and getting back to it. Still can't decide if I should box this.
What this is is the Soda Meiser with clean blend (which has a LPB-1 on it's output so it can go higher than unity (which is vital for me in any blend design)) and the 3pdt assigns the Magnavibe to either clean or dirty sounds, whichever I'd like at any moment. It will go full clean and full dirty. I put the magnavibe speed as a trimpot as I've imagined I'll choose one faster speed that I like and have it there - this was the case, loving it that way. The Depth is made a pot, so if I don't want any wobbliness I'll just turn it down.

A couple of dramatic pictures that I'm known for...







As it was my first design job I made a mistake, the black jumper corrects that. I also planned on having it in 1590B, that's impossible. I left the pads for the resistors so small that I spent an eternity putting those resistors in there. Soldering the transistors was basically an SMD job. The pins are so f-in close to each other. So, yeah, a lot of things didn't go as planned.
Here's how it sounds:

[cloudset]https://soundcloud.com/kuato-design-stompboxes/sets/vibrofuzz-10-prototype-demos[/cloudset]

The first sound sample is going through the sounds and showing the blend. Somewhere around the first minute mark I'll reassign the vibrato from the dirty signal to the clean.

The second sound is how I'd see myself using this. Probably as an additional layer on top of already modulated sounds. Stick this at the end of your board, turn your CE2, reverb, harmonizer on, and just stomp on this thing and you'll have everything preserved just with another dirt layer underneath.

Possible flaws: I've made better sounding soda meisers before. I don't think my magnavibe is pronounced enough (tried every LED/LDR combo out there). The clean sound will distort some with stronger pickups. The LPB-1 does darken the sound a little, it is more noticeable during the blend, so actually I'd probably be better off here with a SHO, maybe. Also, horribly designed PCB, which, somehow, works absolutely flawlessly, but who knows how will it behave on stage (if I even get a gig sometimes soon haha)

What do you guys think?

P.S. Oh god how I love this Mustang. The 01:35 sound gets me every time.

First a bit of posing for you guys hahaha:



Got a Squier VM Mustang Sonic Blue the other day - can't seem to find one fault with this guitar. Had expected a million problems but I cannot be able to find any. Sounds GREAT, plays great, the volume knob has a fantastic taper - great for swells, the tremolo system is fabulous, and it works soooo well. The guitar stays in tune very very well, I am surprised at how well. The thing is, I've found this to be true with all Fender vibrato systems - if you abuse the tremolo bar and it goes out of tune, for the love of god do not touch the tuning pegs, no!, just dick with the tremolo bar some more! It's that simple. After a phrase that I've been using the bar for, I just use it some more after, and eventually it will come back in tune perfectly. The much much worse scenario is - you're playing, you're out of tune, ah shit!, Imma gonna tune that guitar right away. No. Just dick with the bar until it's back in tune.
All in all, huuuge value for money, this guitar. Unmistakable surf sounds, I have a fender inspired custom amp with spring reverb and I can just play a surf rock playlist, play along, and not ever worry whether or not would I be able to replicate any of the sounds - it actually excels at those whacky hawaii-ish out-of-phase sounds. These Duncan Designed pickups work for me perfectly.
I hope more people have had an experience this good with their VM offsets. Cheers!

P.S. There will be a slew of video demos soon.

like this one



wow!

I thought we could have a thread where we could just post DIY builds that amaze us. (sorry guys if such a topic exists already, but I don't think it does) You know, you're having your morning coffee, you're scrolling down the FB news feed, and then bam! something like this flashes before your eyes, and you're like - shiiiiiiiit I gotta share this!

The name I chose with Gustav Vigeland in mind, a Norwegian sculptor that made a profound impact on me and to whom this pedal is loosely dedicated to. "Monolitten 121" stands for his grandious creation - the monolith - at the highest point of Frogner Park in Oslo, Norway. It is comprised of 121 human figures carved in stone, that took 4 sculptors 14 years to make. The monolith is without a doubt the most fascinating structure made by hand that I've witnessed so far. The entirety of Vigeland Installation in Frogner Park is breathtaking and made for one of the greatest experiences in my life, but looking at the monolith felt quite like a religious experience.

A complicated but highly rewarding build. I wouldn't have made it to the other side if it wasn't for the unselfishness and kindness of my good friend and BBD mentor Mr. Panos (teknoman2) who kept my spirits up during the long troubleshooting sessions. Scruffie - you are THE man!
This is a milestone in my building "career", as I've felt that every pedal builder should build an analog delay at least once in their lifetime.

The signal swithing is being done via a clickless relay bypass solution designed by Aleksandar FX, a friend from Serbia, which is an adaptation of the mincester design over from FSB. Works like a treat.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B--6F_4JB7SYRW56SW9sOTZVYWM/view?usp=sharing

What do you think which circuit is this?

...coming soooooooon!

http://www.xviveaudio.com/productInfo.asp?id=286

The MN3008s that I got from our dear Paul have arrived so I thought I should assemble the Aquaboy DX board.

IC1, IC5, IC6 voltages are spot-on on my build. The transistor voltages look fine as well.

The compander is all over the place. I used NE571N. I am powering the build with 14.9V provided via voltage doubling circuit using ICL7660SCPA and then stabilized down to 15V via a 7815. The compander voltages are as follows:

1. starts at 6 or so volts and then gradually falls down to 0.03 (?!)
2. 11.82
3. 11.82
4. 0.00
5. starts at 10.72 then slowly falls down
6. starts at 2V then slowly falls
7. same as pin 5
8. starts at 0.7 then falls

9. 12v stays like that
10. 9.32
11. flashes 11v then falls down (similar behavior like pins 5 and 7)
12. 0.00
13. 14.9
14. , 15., 16. - free fall, which results in almost zero volts

W the actual F?

Any ideas?