Gasalcoholics anonymous? whoever said this was a help group?

[dubkitty]

(sorry, double post)

[dubkitty]

so i guess i've gotten fed up with the compromises i've had to make with the boards and decided to sort shit out once and for all. the first thing that had to go was the Boss LM-2 limiter on the looping board; as i've mentioned around here, i need a brickwall limiter for the looping board output because when you stack up loops the volume can get away from you if you aren't very careful, and crossfading 2 loops sometimes results in a mountain of racket. the LM-2 doesn't do that well at all; it acts more like a clumsy compressor, raising the level of the quiet parts and the noise floor. so i deep-dove compressors used as limiters and narrowed it down to the Keeley Bassist Limiting Amplifier and the Aguilar TLC. i would up going with the Keeley solely because it has a LED to indicate when the compression kicks in while the Aguilar does not. otherwise it would have been tough to choose. with how complicated this setup is, i want everything as out front and obvious as possible. i'd have preferred a nice line of green-to-red LEDs showing the compression threshold, but the units with better displays also had worse capabilities so that wasn't happening. good news: both the Keeley and Aguilar are reasonably priced.

next it was time for that eternal white whale, the clean octave down. i've been using an old EXH Octave Multiplexer for faux bass on my loops, but it's not very good. the output level in octave down mode is less than unity gain, the tracking is a bit random below the 7th fret, and the actual sound isn't wonderful either. so i searched ILF for "clean octave down" and went through 50 pages picking out recommendations, which after a lot of demo comparisons came down to a choice between the FoxRox Octron and the EBS Octabass. this one was quite close...both track exceedingly well for analog octave pedals. in the end the FoxRox just has a more appealing bass tone, so that's going to kick the OM off as soon as it arrives. the OM was never really satisfactory, but i worked with it because it was what i could get for cheap in the early 00s. i find it endlessly amusing that i settled on the same bass box as sylnau, which i tested because he said he liked it best.

i'm now wandering the seas of buzzsaw fuzz, searching for the 60s fuzz sound i hear in my head but can't find in an actual box. i've been through the OG weird fuzzes, Fuzzrite and Maestro and that, but they aren't quite cruel enough. i need more teeth. so i Googled "buzzsaw fuzz" and paged through way too many results which i narrowed down to about 25 prospects. i've been chopping some items for being too tame (e.g. Boss FZ-2 is still contending, HM-2 is relegated) or not hitting the right point in my sinuses, and noting aspects of the ones i like for later comparison. if i get really stupid i could go through all of that stuff tomorrow, but that would probably be pushing myself too hard. tomorrow's forecast is cloudy with a 60% of FY-2 clones accompanied by Foxx Tone Machines and other weird shite ranging from the Wooly Mammoth to various DBA boxes and a number of odd critters scattered in for fun, some of which will no doubt be as unobtainable as some of the limiter and bass box candidates. i just really want the setup-finagling part of my life to be over and replaced with conceptual fine tuning. i see the light at the end of the tunnel. i'm happy with the way the rest of the stuff on the boards is working, but those 3 boxes--bass octaver, limiter, and buzzsaw fuzz--just weren't cutting it and they had to go so i can get this stuff shipshape and start the development work that's going to be required to get new ideas together. two-thirds of that should be sorted by the end of next week. back to the fuzz mines...

[Warpsmasher]

^Behringer SF300, seriously worth a try, I use mine all the time and love it

[Warpsmasher]

+ Got the SA Ultrawave a couple weeks ago. For black friday shenanigans I hit the musician's friend sale and ordered a mooer groove loop and delptronics thunderclap 2 (pedalbox format). I...guess I'm going semi-modular? Somewhat. I really like the Hikari Duos and Monos desktop units and will most likely end up with one or both at some point.

[dubkitty]

the limiter and octaver are supposed to be here on Monday. the Yamaha foldable keyboard bench arrived today and is perfect, just the right length to allow me to perch on either end to get to the front-end and looping boards which can now be arranged at 90° to the big board and reach everything without stretching my legs too far. so things are moving on along. but then there was the Quest For Fuzz With Beeg Ugly Teeth...

boy, have i listened to a bunch of fuzz demos over the last couple of days. i literally wound up Googling "buzzsaw fuzz" and "extreme fuzz pedal" and going through 10 or 15 pages of results for each including long Reddit threads. i wound up with about 45 pedals in all. some were too tame; for this application i don't want the typical "overdrive with big teeth" fuzz sound but rather more of a square or sawtooth wave. some were too over-the-top; i want something that sounds consistently nasty rather than random, so boxes like the Unpleasant Surprise, Bad Comrade, the MASF catalog, and a couple of others i can't recall were just too unpredictably insane. i wound up narrowing the base designs down to three main groups: Super Fuzz/FY-6 (which includes the Behringer mentioned above), Foxx Tone Machine, and Acetone Fuzz Master. the finalists included one of each:

--Acetone: EQD Fuzzmaster General
--Tone Machine: Danelectro 3699
--FY-6: Guyatone TZ-2

looking at my notes--yes, i got to the point where i had to take notes on how the the last eight or ten boxes differed from each other--the Fuzzmaster dropped off first because it was "less gainy, scooped." comparing the 3699 and TZ-2, the 3699, which won out over the Teisco Fuzz as Tone Machine representative, was "looser, more distant somehow, toothier" while the TZ-2 was "more artificial-sounding, more nasal" (note: these aren't necessarily bad things for this use case). i want jagged edges so i'm going for the 3699 but it was a very close call.

i'm going to take a moment here to bitch about the piss-poor quality of most pedal reviewers. it was particularly difficult to find decent demos of the Teisco and Guyatone boxes, and i had to wade through up to 10 or 12 different demos looking for ones where the demoist played the boxes at maximum gain and played sustained notes on the bottom strings. shredding doesn't tell me a thing about how it acts when i hold one note for 2 or 3 seconds, which is a thing in my world. and why do a demo of a pedal with a FUZZ knob and leave it parked at 12 o'clock for the entire 6 minutes? i literally wound up having to compare ten- or fifteen-second segments of the final 4 where everyone had the gain dimed and was playing in the lower register. now get off my lawn.

i'm going to let this settle a bit because i have an odd thing to deal with...that obsessive EQD collector guy showed up on one of the pedal-related subreddits asking after rare gear and is interested in my Sound Shank (#16, grey finish) and i need to take photos. i hate to let it go, but i have a couple of fuzzes that get close enough that i can spare it and frankly i need the money at the moment. so i'm not ordering it yet and any last-minute recommendations are still welcome. but they'll have to be gnarlier than the 3699 here from 3:05 to 3:30 while maintaining note shape. i'd better get out my Velcroscillator and see how it, erm, stacks up.

[dubkitty]

no, i did not save the master list.

[dubkitty]

update: EQD Collector Guy is buying my grey Sound Shank #16 for $350. i'm mildly stunned. maybe this selling gear business isn't so bad after all. i could have really tried to gouge him due to the rarity, but i'm just not that kind of a person. just because someone's exploitable doesn't mean you should exploit them.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Wow, seems crazy, but good news for you I guess I don't quite understand collectors.

Totally agree on the quality of demo videos... Unless a pedal is really popular or new there's usually no good demos that show the range of a piece of gear, even if there are any demos at all.

[dubkitty]

he also bought my big box Tone Reaper #140 for $250. i'm a happy boy.

[dubkitty]

so this morning i went ahead and ordered a used 3699 Fuzz. it also struck me that i was really going to miss the sounds of the Sound Shank (Buzzaround/Fripp) and Tone Reaper (MK!!! Tone Bender). i was a little reluctant to let go of the Reaper despite it being so gainy that it was almost impossible to use on a board because it was hard to keep it near unity gain with the clean signal because i love that sound so much. i remembered a guy in Maryland who builds inexpensive bad-ass clones of crazy fuzz circuits and looked him up. he's CMC Effects on Reverb. i bought one of his MKII Benders used and it's a great little box, so i figured he'd do well with these 2. i couldn't keep the EQD boxes because $600 is $600, but these should pretty well replace them for $160 total.

[K2000]

I'm thinking about getting another fuzz because hey, I love fuzz... I seem to be torn between the Mask Audio Electronics "No" and the Dr. Scientist "Frazz Dazzler" (I know they don't sound alike, that's part of my dilemma).

No: Half the price of the Frazz Dazzler. Only two knobs, so it's simple to use (yay) but probably not very flexible (sigh). Probably very Normal Rock resistant. But I have a bunch of noisy fuzzes already, and none of them completely filled the emptiness inside. Maybe the same lesson here? (I have plenty of Normal Rock fuzzes too.)

Frazz Dazzler: More expensive. Soft touch switches (yay). More flexible, I assume. Options like EQ can usually help a lot (or become a hellish maze of knob adjusting, in the worst case scenario). I see positive reviews. Probably a little closer to Normal Rock territory than the No. But maybe more usable.

Likes: radical textures, "reasonable" sustain. Dislikes: muddiness, absurd note squelching (cutoff).

What say you?

[Warpsmasher]

The Danelectro Eisenhower is supposed to be a pretty great shin-ei/fz-2 type. Curiosity is growing, perhaps it will unseat my Behringer. The 3699 is actually the official current version of the FTM.

Just grabbed a 3/4 scale Peavey Rotor from craigs:


It's so small and simple and direct, I love it. Regular size explorers have always felt too big and clunky to me, but this thing is just breezy.
It's the little things: I'm also stoked about the cable, it's has the Bookman's logo and website on the orange part. Bookman's is a local Arizona chain that used to just be for used books, magazines, videos and music, video games etc, and they fed my music and comic book collections much and more over the years...they started dealing in used gear right about the time I started getting into it myself, in the early 2000s, when the internet started to kill sales of all the media stuff. I need to go hit them up one of these days, maybe trade some stuff in.

Also pounced on an Alesis AirSynth, first one I've seen on reverb in a long time, and it's NIB. I used to have one a long time ago, and have been waiting to add it to the forever collection for a while now, but they've become quite scarce.

[dubkitty]

i compared the two Dano fuzzes and preferred the 3699. believe it or not, FY-2s aren't nasty enough for me compared to the 3699. so. many. fucking. demos. if i don't hear any more fuzz demos this year i'll be fine with that.

the boards project continues apace. the Keeley Bassist Limiting Amplifier arrived yesterday so i wired it up as soon as i got home from Becky's this morning. it's not an absolute brick wall--if i turn up the Loop Level on the Ditto all the way it still gets louder (if somewhat less so than with the limiter off)--but it does limit peaks extremely well. i used a loop to test it which consists of a pattern of 2 notes about a second apart with about 4 seconds between each iteration played through the Attack Delay, flanger, and reverb with a bit of ring mod bells between iterations for atmosphere that repeats 4 times; the first two iterations are at medium volume, but the second 2 are louder and much louder respectively. by dropping the Threshold i was able to make the limiter hold all four iterations to the volume of the first 2 with no audible change or coloration. this thing is as clean as clean can be, and utterly transparent. the only way i could improve on this is by mounting my Rane MC22 rackmount compressor under the looping board and i'm not getting into that shit.

i may have mentioned that i'm going through my shoeboxes of unused pedals looking to sell stuff i won't use. as part of that i re-evaluated my Menatone Pleasure Trem 5000 which i'd booted from the board because the Fender MTG Tube Tremolo i replaced it with has loads of waveform options including doing Vox Repeat Percussion chop with variable duty cycle. i love having those options, but when compared side-by-side the Menatone sounds tons better. i'd like to say it's warm-sounding, but it's more that it doesn't color the tone much while the Fender has a bit of sharpness and over-trebleness to it. when i listened to "Pictures of You" the other day i was struck by how beautiful the PT5000 sounds on it. so now i'm stuck without a hard chop option and am rather bummed about that. also a bit disappointed because used PT5000s go for $300 these days.

the other bright side about the Menatone is that it's tiny compared to the Fender which is a huge orange beast larger than a 1590BB enclosure (which is to say the PT5000 is about the size of a Distortion+), so i have acres of room to fit another pedal onto the top tier. at this time the plan is to add one of the two CMC fuzzes that will come in soon; this will result in the return of the four-dirt module at lower/center right on the board, for which space the Flashback will get kicked up to the top tier between the tremolo and the Soft Focus. i'll have some fuzz (Distortion+), lots of fuzz (Buzzaround/TB MKIII), dense heavy fuzz (Fuzzhugger 3-knob Great Wall) and batshit crazy sawtooth wave (3699). if i can fit another pedal besides that i'll be looking at a Hummingbird so i can get back to choppy choppy. but i'm not pulling everything apart and rearranging shit until everything's here. in the meantime i can play and stuff. this may be where the new-style 3"/6" ribbon cables with the low-profile plugs come into their own, possibly buying me the extra room for the Hummingbird.

the Foxrox Octron bass box arrives Tuesday. assuming that works as well as the Keeley limiter the only remaining issue is replacing the Fuzzrite with the 3699 which should be a simple drop-in replacement. then i work up stuff with the system as-is until my fuzz options arrive.

i also got out my Cantrell wah and dialed it in. the great thing about it is that the toe-down frequency is adjustable, so i can either make it sound like a regular wah or like an envelope filter by rolling off the top frequency. it's really striking. not tempted to give up the Discumbobulator, though. that's another obsolete box i love because it makes the sounds i want to hear.

[le lambin]

Just ordered a Soma cosmos because I apparently hate having any money at all- I’ll let you know if this was a terrible decision or not in a few days when it arrives.

[dub]

I'm not sure the fuzz quest ever truly ends.

I love a good superfuzz but don't usually have them on my board. I've also been slowly assembling a bigger setup lately, after sticking to small 4-5 pedal arrangements in the past. Like dubkitty, the last thing I've been eyeing up is an Octron3. I've currently got a sepukku Octave Drone in that spot, stacking that into dirt gets my into that superfuzz territory when I want it. Never much liked the octave up in Foxx Tone Machines, but loved it with it off as a thick and hairy rhythm tone.

Despite not being a big fan of reverb at all, I have somehow end up with three sitting there, trying to narrow it down. I've been using the hall setting on the RV-3 as my standard boring reverb tone on my cleans. Just picked up an Afterneath for the first time, and having fun with that for more textural stuff (although I don't think it will stay, as I generally use my El Cap for the soundscapey bits), and I am having trouble kicking off my RV-2, because the plate setting with a high mix is just glorious on sustained fuzz tones... I might swap the RV-3 for a HOF mini and mount that underneath to tidy everything up.