The Elements, favorite settings, post them here!

[leaves turn]

Elements #55 showed up in the mail today. Plan is for it to cover the dirt spectrum between my FB-2 and Oxide. Haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but I have noticed a lot of noise on high gain settings. I'm not sure if it's my rig or the Elements though - which units had the grounding noise issue?

[goroth]

yours!

[leaves turn]

So is the fix just tying board ground to chassis ground? Is there a particular grounding point that works best?

[Ryan]

Sorry to hear about the noise! If you show us a pic of the inside of your box we can see if it's grounded or not and then show you the right tabs for ground. Super easy fix. It won't silent it though, it's still got a lot of noise with the gain knob over noon in high gain mode, just comes with the territory of how high gain the pedal is.

[leaves turn]

Doesn't look like anyone's done any extra work. I've got plenty of solder/wire/copper tape laying around; what's the fix?

[Ryan]

Totally, that sucker's not grounded! Sorry! *smacks forehead again*

The easiest place to get at ground is the tabs on the in/out jacks, the closest tabs to the enclosure edge are ground. You scuff up some of the metal inside edge of the box near one of those ground tabs, get it shiny and scratched up nicely, then stick a little piece of copper tape down over the area, like a half inch kinda thing. Then take a short wire and solder one end onto the big folded ground lug of the jack. (Be careful to not get too much solder on there as it'll roll down and solder your jack closed!) Solder the other end of the wire to the copper tape. Boom, grounded Elements!

Now the other thing about your Elements is it's the very first run and it's tuned a little hot.. it's noisier with the gain knob at noon than today's Elements would be.. you might find you use this badboy with the gain knob set a lil lower, or we could go over a resistor change or two to lower the gain of that stage. Personally, I think that version ripped the hardest and I don't really care about background noise, that kind of gain is for palm mutes and power chords, not silent parts, but I neutered it in the next pcb round to bring the noise level down. *looks down and kicks a rock*

[Jero]

I did a little quick and dirty grounding "mod", on my trem and Elements, and now they are as quiet as it is in outer space
I may have voided my warranty tho , here's a photo of the little "mod"

It looks cruel but it works for me

[Ryan]

yeah that says it a lot better than I did, geeez you're good Jeromy!

[leaves turn]

Cool, simple enough mod, but I don't have sandpaper so this'll have to wait until tomorrow. Have you noticed if it makes a difference whether both jacks are grounded, or just one of them?

[Ryan]

All you need is one.. the jacks are both grounded it's just that the enclosure isn't, so one path to ground for the enclosure is all you need. I suggest something like needle nose pliers to scuff up the metal inside the box, really rough it up so you get a great contact. Sorry again for the repair work!

[leaves turn]

The pliers worked just fine. Mod is done, seems quieter, but yeah there's still noise past 11 or so on high gain. No big deal. I'm not upset in any way Ryan, I know what it's like to mess up on a board. I've had that stack of dead PCBs sitting on my desk. That's life.

[VBD]

I made the mod very simple.... With a wire made a circle and coated with solder, made the ring and soldered the rest. Worked fine.

[Ryan]

Nice job!

[DarkAxel]

Hey guys, so um I just went through some of the settings you posted and I can't get over it

can't get over how the pedal is versatile and how i absolutely don't know how to get those vastly different sounds that is for example the Syl's "fuzz like" setting in the first post sounds like the best muff I've ever played kind of thing

anyway... sterted playing bass blahblahblah it's all here viewtopic.php?f=149&t=40062#p780196

apparently I need some Rat settings to get close to this bass sound:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvaJngF3hoU[/youtube]

due to the lack of deeper understanding of stuff, I'd really appreciate any people posting rat settings that are nice for bass... I can't exactly play the rig I play any time I want... thanks very much!

[Ryan]

That's a great guitar/bass tone there, really dense and cool.. I have a hard time suggesting how to set up bass tones since I don't have one but one trick I can tell you about getting lots of versatility out of the Elements is to explore the extremes. You get to extra cool tones by turning the mids knob all the way down or all the way up and then using a bass cut setting that emphasizes it.

I'm not sure off the top of my head how to set the Elements to sound like a Rat but I guarantee it'll be able to get close.. I've got a Rat clone, I'll experiment a bit and get back to you...