Gasalcoholics anonymous? whoever said this was a help group?

[K2000]

I might swap the RV-3 for a HOF mini and mount that underneath to tidy everything up.

Be sure to try that HOF Mini before trading. I didn't care for the way that pedal sounds, it might have been user error though. I tend to like mini pedals. But not that one, for some reason.

[Tall Walls]

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.

I've had a rocky relationship with mine over the year or so that I've had it, but right now I'm feeling positive about it. I spent a lot of time with the rhythmic firmware, trying to bend the Cosmos to my will, but recently I reloaded the main firmware and I'm allowing the Cosmos to dominate me and it's working out much better.

[dubkitty]

winter system completion GAS continues apace. i figured out that the answer for my sudden lack of squarewave blip tremolo was the Zvex Sonar, which is dedicated to the chop, the whole chop, and nothing but the chop. i got an insane deal on Reverb, where they usually go for over $200...i saw one the other day for $140 and when i went to buy it they'd dropped the price to $115. so if i can't find a way to make it fit i can always flip it and double my money LOL. the Octron was supposed to arrive today but is delayed; the 3699 is due Thursday. i also ordered a piano-style sustain pedal for my Casio keyboard which i've needed forever because my piano style relies heavily on the sustain pedal. i just want to get finished with doing project-construction shit and start enjoying myself again. but by god, when it's ready it's going to be fucking well RIGHT. i should probably get more low-profile ribbon cable pedal connectors because this arrangement is going to require a great big shoehorn.

[le lambin]

I've had a rocky relationship with mine over the year or so that I've had it, but right now I'm feeling positive about it. I spent a lot of time with the rhythmic firmware, trying to bend the Cosmos to my will, but recently I reloaded the main firmware and I'm allowing the Cosmos to dominate me and it's working out much better.

I’ve found this to be the case with nearly all Soma gear- you just have to let it take you wherever it wants to go. I made this mistake when I had a pulsar and it was my only drum machine. It did not like being forced to be an all rounder, and I never put in the time or effort to understand it. Sad!

[le lambin]

winter system completion GAS continues apace. i figured out that the answer for my sudden lack of squarewave blip tremolo was the Zvex Sonar, which is dedicated to the chop

I recently acquired a Sonar and really like it- the sawtooth waveform is where it’s at.

[dubkitty]

i have a whole unintentional theme going here...my main board will now have 2 tremolos (Menatone Pleasure Trem 5000, Zvex Sonar), 2 delays (TC Flashback and EHX Canyon), and 2 reverbs (EQD Ghost Echo and Catalinbread Soft Focus). i refuse to buy 2 tuners, though. this is the logical consequence of my aesthetic preference for simple units that do a couple of things really well rather than multi-function units that try to do everything and fail. i also will have four dirt/fuzz on the board when my Buzzaround and Tone Bender MKIII arrive and i decide which gets on the board. that'll be Distortion+, Buzzaround or Tone Bender, Fuzzhugger 3-knob Great Wall, 3699 in order of extremity. i was bored today so i cleaned up the power cabling on my main board, coiling each cable neatly and securing the coils with tape. it's still a bit chaotic, but now it's comprehensible. i also spent an hour going through the Canyon's secondary knob functions and tweaking all the presets so it complements the Flashback, e.g. the Flashback has a Tape setting that's dark but fairly clean, so i made the Canyon's setting more distorted and fluttery. i think i've got it about optimized now. the Shimmer setting is actually useful now, the Reverb setting is just on the edge of too much, and i adjusted the modulation on the Mod setting so it's audible but not excessive. the 3699 arrived today, but i'm not fucking with the board any more tonight. tomorrow i might set it up in the 4-fuzz configuration using my MKII Tone Bender as a placeholder. and the bass box for the front-end board is lost in the vast singularity of the Richmond, VA USPS sorting facility. <sings>some-daaaaaay my bass will come</sings>.

[le lambin]

i have a whole unintentional theme going here...my main board will now have 2 tremolos (Menatone Pleasure Trem 5000, Zvex Sonar), 2 delays (TC Flashback and EHX Canyon), and 2 reverbs (EQD Ghost Echo and Catalinbread Soft Focus). i refuse to buy 2 tuners, though. this is the logical consequence of my aesthetic preference for simple units that do a couple of things really well rather than multi-function units that try to do everything and fail. i also will have four dirt/fuzz on the board when my Buzzaround and Tone Bender MKIII arrive and i decide which gets on the board. that'll be Distortion+, Buzzaround or Tone Bender, Fuzzhugger 3-knob Great Wall, 3699 in order of extremity. i was bored today so i cleaned up the power cabling on my main board, coiling each cable neatly and securing the coils with tape. it's still a bit chaotic, but now it's comprehensible. i also spent an hour going through the Canyon's secondary knob functions and tweaking all the presets so it complements the Flashback, e.g. the Flashback has a Tape setting that's dark but fairly clean, so i made the Canyon's setting more distorted and fluttery. i think i've got it about optimized now. the Shimmer setting is actually useful now, the Reverb setting is just on the edge of too much, and i adjusted the modulation on the Mod setting so it's audible but not excessive. the 3699 arrived today, but i'm not fucking with the board any more tonight. tomorrow i might set it up in the 4-fuzz configuration using my MKII Tone Bender as a placeholder. and the bass box for the front-end board is lost in the vast singularity of the Richmond, VA USPS sorting facility. <sings>some-daaaaaay my bass will come</sings>.

Your looping rig sounds very well stocked- how are you using all these pedals? Do you have specific songs where you use a combination of pedals for a specific sound, or do you just improv and use whatever whenever? Personally I wouldn’t be able to make music with so many options at once- I usually need a pretty lean palette to make interesting loops. Do you find that having so many options frees you up to be more creative in the moment? I should also ask if you are writing your music ahead of time or improvising?

[dubkitty]

at this time i'm improvising. all the stuff on my Soundcloud was improvised. i may or may not start doing prepared material...as i think i said above the reason for the 1440 looper is to be able to call up prepared stuff, which i guess assumes i'll be preparing some things which i have done in my previous incarnation with the 2-looper setup in the late 00s. lately i've been messing with "Varðeldur" by Sigur Rós which is a perfect looping piece. the two Ditto looper inputs are on an A/B pan pedal so i can switch the input signal from one to the other and crossfade loops; the 1440 has its own mini volume pedal.

similarly, the big board is mostly used to feed signal into the looping board unless i'm doing something with other people involved. i don't really find it all that complicated because i tried to arrange everything in a logical order and i generally have one setting on most boxes that remains more or less constant other than tremolo, delay, and the ring modulator. 4 flavors of dirt from mild to insane in ascending order, envelope filter, modulation in order of extremity except the ring modulator which sits on the lower right corner of the board so its expression pedal input is available, one tremolo for pretty sounds and one for hard chop, two delays that complement each other, and two reverbs one of which is my always-on room generator. i'm like "pick a fuzz. quack box: yes or no? now pick a modulation or two (note: ring mod into flanger is lovely). tremolo, yes or no? if so, soft or hard chop? delay? if so, what flavor? huge additional shoegaze reverb or naw?" note that though the delays have 9 and 10 available settings respectively, only 5 and 6 respectively are useful to me at all and the main options are 3 settings on the Flashback and 4 on the Canyon. the 3 settings on the Flashback are similar to 3 of the 4 Canyon settings (2290/ECHO, ANA/DMM, TAPE/TAPE) but they're noticeably different from each other. my other typical Canyon setting is MOD, which also appears on the Flashback but in a rather lifeless way. i need to get an Echorec or oil-can delay Toneprint, which may finally motivate me to work that whole thing out.

i sit down with the setup running and pick put a couple of effects to start with, and noodle around until i have an idea or a pattern develops. then i choose others that i think complement the first bits. i'm quite fond of making bell noises on the ring modulator. i have a volume pedal for the big board and an EHX Attack Delay on the pre-processing board so stuff also fades in regularly. i do find that having options that i determined and know i like is freeing because i can go "which of these sounds i love shall i put together?." in an improvisational context--by which i mean that the entire thing is made up on the spot, not someone soloing over changes--every variation of texture is facilitative. and i don't have to hunt around for them...i know exactly where each one lives.

the one drawback is that i have to fade loops out manually using the Loop Level controls except on the 1440 which has a neat fadeout feature where it'll fade for up to a minute and a half. but i just don't have space for 3 more volume controllers of any type anywhere near the looping board which is crammed like a Tokyo subway car.

[edit: i realized this would be impossible to follow without seeing the setup. i really don't mean to keep spamming photos, but the damned thing keeps changing on me. the Zvex Sonar will go in the empty slot in the middle left of the main board. i remain at the mercy of the USPS.]

12-8-23 full.jpg.png (572.36 KiB) Viewed 1917 times

[dubkitty]

This is an early version of "Varðeldur" which was released on their live album Inni under the title "Lúppulagið" (literally "Loop Song") which shows its potential for solo looping.

[le lambin]

I love sigur ros and have never heard that song- thanks for sharing! Thanks for going through all that- it’s really interesting to hear your approach to live looping- very interesting set up with the dual dittos on a pan pedal. It makes a lot of sense that you have that many dirt boxes but they each do a certain sound- using each pedal as a specific color to add to the loop as you see fit. The whole set up is impressive!

Also I recently acquired a EHX attack decay- I know you said you’re a fan of that pedal in the past, and man I have to agree- it’s really amazing! I am pleasantly surprised how inspiring it is- really easy and fun to use.

[Warpsmasher]

Interest in drum machine loopers continues, stepped it up to a Digitech Trio +, it's pretty impressive, and I want to run it through every dirt pedal I own.

[dubkitty]

to get the most out of the Attack Decay i strongly recommend 2 things:

1. put other pedals in the AD's effects loop. there's something really wonderful about a batch of effects all swelling in together. my pre-processing board is a bass box, then the AD, then the AD's FX loop with Ibanez LF7 Lo Fi, Zvex Instant Lo-Fi Junky, and Fairfield Shallow Water, then back through the AD and out to a Boss RV-3.

2. use a good expression pedal. the AD is way easier to use when you don't have to reach down to adjust your favorite parameter. i use a Moog EP-3 to adjust the Attack. which lets me vary the attack time so it assists phrasing, e.g. several short notes with a shorter attack, then a chord with a longer ramp-up. you can assign any of the knobs or a combination thereof to the expression pedal.

every modern EHX pedal i've tried is a much richer sound source if you go into the Secondary settings. that's where the magic happens.

[dubkitty]

the Zvex Sonar tremolo arrived yesterday. i had a hell of a time fitting it on the board because the DC jack at one end is so close to the IN jack that it was almost impossible to find a way to wire it in the open spot without a longer cable--say 8"-9"--than i had because the plug blocked the DC port. i finally managed to cram it in by stretching a 6" MXR cable about as taut as it would go so i could run it around the other side and underneath the center slat. the Sonar had to go in that horizontal slot so i can reach both switches, most importantly the tap tempo switch. if i start feeling concerned it's overstretched i'll order a 7" cable (they do exist), but the MXR 6" cables are much more robust than your typical Hosa sort of thing so it should be OK. so that's it except for auditioning the new Buzzaround and MKIII when they arrive. for now i'm done, and not a moment too soon. it took hours to get that damned thing into the remaining space and thread all the cables through the plethora of cables already there. the only thing left is the Octron i'm replacing the Octave Multiplexer on the front-end board with and that will be a drop-in replacement. i also have a 1-into-2 9V power supply adapter coming in so i can run the wah pedal and the tuner off the same slot since all 16 slots on the 2 MXR DC Bricks are in use, and a 22" TRS cable with right-angle connectors to link the Randy's Revenge and the Moog EP-2...i tried shortening a really long TRS cable that came with my EP-3 that i use with the Attack Delay, but the straight plugs stuck out too far from the side of the board and interfered with the pedal.

[dubkitty]

yeah, i could use the DC out on the Polytune, but i feel like it's neater to hook up the wah power cable under the board.

[dubkitty]

the black hole at USPS Richmond has finally disgorged my Foxrox Octron 8 days after it arrived and it's out for delivery in Charlottesville today. which means that the front-end board will be finished tonight. we're getting closer. i spent a bunch of time last night setting the Loop Level controls on the loopers so the loops and the input are at unity gain and dialed in the limiter a bit more. i'm trying to keep the threshold setting up to where it only kicks in for the most extreme shit. i had all 3 loopers going at once for a bit, which is why i had to dial in their output levels since they were drowning each other out. i also discovered the adjustment knobs on the Moog expression pedals and can now tune their sweep as needed. i set the one for the Attack Delay so it only sets attacks to lengths where the note reaches a relatively normal volume level by the end of the rise and will set the one for the Randy's Revenge for maximum bendage which i was was rather distressed not to be getting compared to using a plastic-cased 60s Schaller volume pedal on this track here. i may add a patch point to the signal chain like i've done in the past by using two 1/4 right angle adapters between the modulation and tremolo so i can patch in the Black Finger compressor (or other stuff) if needed. i tend to stay away from compression but the BF is really good. i need to get some nice NOS tubes so i can go all Stephen Stills on everyone's ass with the late 60s LA studio transparent squish. i could of course put it at the end of the main board or patch it in before the chorus at top right but i'd prefer not to compress the tremolos, delays, or reverbs while compressing the modulation to avoid pesky spikes. it looks like there may be just enough room between the PM7 and the Pleasure Trem 5000 to pull it off.