ilovefuzz.com

I only bought three things this year, and all of them in the first quarter -

Boss DC-2W - always wanted this effect, does not disappoint.

Guild M-20 - my dreadnought needs major repairs that I'm not sure I'm ready to shell out for, and I needed a steel string. This came up on CL for a good price because it had some bumps and scratches. It's a great recording guitar.

Zoom H4n recorder - I did not need this at all but it was like $125 and I simply could not pass it up.

I thought about upgrading my amp modeler and maybe getting a Gamechanger Light, but do I really need to?

progress continues apace. i got a couple of really good 90-degree 1/4" adapters and used them to create a patch point under the big board between the delays and the reverbs. they're Chinese doodads off Amazon, but they're quite sturdy and much more solid and dependable than the typical cylindrical Hosa adapters which go bad about 50% of the time because the plug portion is only pressed in, not soldered. i'm going to try running the EHX Black Finger tube compressor in there as an experiment...i haven't used it in ages, but i remember it being able to do a nice kind of fattening + limiting thing that wasn't overbearingly squishy. if it works well enough to keep in the setup i have a pair of Telefunken 12AX7s i'm watching on eBay to get the most hi-fi 1966 Gold Star Studios LA tube compressor sound possible on a ghetto budget. i think i'll leave the patch points there whether or not i end up keeping the BF. there may be other useful things to try at that spot in the chain. or i could move the insert point to between the fuzz and the envelope filter or the EF and the modulation...there's enough room in both spots to squeeze the adapters in because their profile isn't that much bigger than a typical non-pancake 1/4" plug. and if the BF doesn't work out i'll have two Telefunken preamp tubes to put in the Hammond reverb amp to nice up the sound.

i looked up the current draw of everything on my big board and it's less than the 1200 mA supplied by the wall wart running the chained MXR DC Bricks powering the board, so i can live with them for awhile since a proper supply with an onboard transformer would be pretty steep. also got the adapter that allows me to run the tuner and wah (total draw = 61 mA) off one 9V port so there's one spot left for whichever of the overdrive-ish pedals coming gets used (if either does) and everything's properly powered. the Katzenkönig is supposed to arrive tomorrow, but i don't think it will...USPS hasn't been doing very well this season though they've been better this week. i'm not going to get the CMC pedals until sometime in January after he builds them up, and am really hot to get them because the Tone Bender MKIII and Buzzaround sounds worked really well on my old loops, the TB in particular. IMO all fuzzes should have tone controls so you can control the size of the teeth. the big question for next week will be "Distortion+ or Katzenkönig?" i can't see myself without the D+ which was my first pedal and has gone everywhere with me since the mid-80s, but i feel like my fuzz section is kind of treble-heavy and the Rat filter in the K might help give me more useable tones. then the January question will be "WIIO in front or Katzenkönig after the D+?" February will probably be plagued with dirt rearrangements until i find the golden combination. whoopee! more A/B testing! have i mentioned how much i'm getting to hate doing this?

it's weird now because when i want to move the big board or pick it up to put on a work surface (which i've been having to do regularly) i not only have to deal with the signal in and out cables, the AC cord for the TC SCF flanger, and the 18V DC in for the power supplies, but also with the TRS cable to the expression pedal for the Randy's Revenge (which works wonderfully) and the 9V power cable that goes to the wah which sits off the board on the other side of the main volume pedal. it'll be extra good to be able to quit moving stuff around because of this, which just makes it that much more annoying. disconnecting everything is like taking a golden retriever off life support.

oh, i completely forgot to mention that the Saturnworks guy wrote back and says the 3-channel box with channels routable to the volume pedal is doable. i'll be communicating with him for a few days sorting out the details, but if this works it's going to be a Really Good Thing. and i even have room to squeeze the additional VP between the RR's expression pedal and the looping board at the right of the loop board.

i remember back in the mid-80s i was living in a 12-foor travel trailer crammed full of music stuff and multiple tape decks i used for Dead tape trading. the house manager came out to talk to me--i believe i had the stereo with 2 cassette decks with LED meters (which were kind of a new thing then) copying in the background while playing electric guitar through the Princeton Reverb--and said "it looks like Skylab in there." this setup is starting to feel like Mission Control.

mission control sounds about right. Awesome. Glad the idea is working out!

I'm a MASF junky

so i spent several hours yesterday morning rearranging the front tier of the big board to see if i'll be able to squeeze in an additional gain pedal. since i don't have a ton of varied cables, this wound up becoming a long treasure hunt for cables used on one of the other boards that was longer than needed or had the proper connectors. everything sitting next to each other had to have pancake connectors or it wasn't going to happen.

surprisingly, it actually worked with the Polytune vertically offset so it hangs on next to the Katzenkönig at bottom right. when the CMC Effects devices come in it'll be easier because they both have top jacks. the Katzenkönig and the MKII Tone Bender next to it are placeholders which will be replaced by some combination of TB MKIII, Buzzaround, or Catalinbread WIIO clone. the WIIO would wire before the Distortion+ to keep my gain hierarchy constant; i expect that the difference between the MKIII and Buzzaround isn't going to be that huge because they're largely the same circuit with different controls, but it's always possible i could use both and tune them to contrast with each other.

i think this is the first time ever that i've had the Randy's Revenge and Ghost Echo both in their correct orientation rather than sideways. it makes connecting the RR's expression pedal a pain; for now i just leave a 24" flat TRS cable plugged into the RR that dangles off the board when i disconnect everything. i guess i'll take it off if i take the big board out by itself.

i still have to write the Saturnworks guy back...i've been busy with Christmas with my gf and her family and been too busy and/or tired to concentrate, and it's difficult to be extremely specific about something that's still in the conceptual stage. i'll probably do it tomorrow. anyway, here's rush hour on the big board Christmas Eve morning. too bad the Katzenkönig isn't a keeper...that segment of the board goes nicely together with the orange, goldtone, and mustard shades.

[edited after more testing] the Katzenkönig won't be a part of my future because unfortunately it's noisy for the amount of dirt you get. the Rat part of the circuit is extremely noisy if you turn it up past 9 o'clock; the MKI part is reasonably quiet with the Rat ("Gain") knob all the way down, but any combination of the 2 gets very buzzy. with both jacked up it's noisier than the 3699 at full crack. if it was quieter the fact that it gets pretty close to the Distortion+ sound would be a factor, but unfortunately when i dial that it in it's way noisier than the D+ which still reigns as my undefeated world champion in the drive pedal class. i note for the record that the noise is coming from the guitar or front-end board, probably the guitar...when i zero out the volume pedal it's reasonably quiet and the other fuzzes that get interference get less of it. so maybe i do have to get a more solid power supply. or maybe that's how the world is. it's a Les Paul so it's not single-coil noise.

i'm going to get a Korg or Peterson tuner to replace the Polytune because they're both more accurate (0.1 cent vs. 0.3 for the Polytune) but to me they're both ugly comparatively. not sure if i'll get a full-sized one or a mini, but i'm not touching the Korg XS because i don't trust the "step on the frame anywhere and it's the switch" concept, nor does actually stomping on the tuner screen seem like a wise design choice. those things are going to fail left and right. both the standard-sized tuners are actually bigger (wider) than the Polytune and also have side jacks so that's a squish, but i hesitate to commit to a Tiny Tuner given my horrible eyesight.

well, i did some diagnostic testing and it's not that the Katzenkönig--or any of my other high-gain fuzzes for that matter--are that excessively noisy, it's that noise is getting introduced into the system somewhere and amplified by the fuzz. i tried the guitar straight into the amp and changed guitar cables; no noise. i then decided to plug into just the big board. to my surprise, that's much less noisy that the big setup. i patched in the looper board after the main board, and things were still OK. i thought maybe my old Polytune could be playing up because it's done a few wonky things in the last season, but taking it off/putting it back on had no (or extremely little) effect on the noise floor with gain happening.

so that meant it has to be somewhere in the front-end board. i tried running that board by itself and the Ibanez Lo Fi and Instant Lo-Fi Junky are noisy as hell when actuated, worse than the 3699 wound 80% of the way up. it could be that one or more of them has a interference problem of some sort. it could be some kind of incompatibility with the Truetone 6-spot power supply...apparently they can be noisier than Voodoo or Cioks supplies for some transformer-related reason and both problematic boxes are mounted more or less right over the PS which is under the deck. it could be that the lo-fi devices don't like being in the AD's effects loop. or it could just be that something--my money's on the Instant Lo-Fi Junky which has been noisy from the day it came here and seems inherently noise-prone and excessively gain-y--is leaky enough that it fucks up the signal from the front-end board even when it's turned off and then somehow passes that on to the big board. so i'll try removing those 2 boxes first and see if that sorts it. if it doesn't i'm going to have to pull everything apart (after taking reference photos so i don't have to re-invent the wheel), test each piece individually with the PS and a 9V wall wart (to test if the PS is the problem), and try redoing the signal path so it doesn't use the AD's effects loop if the boxes test good because it occurs to me that there could be some kind of weird ground loop-esque thing happening there. i already had to change power supplies because the Shallow Water doesn't get on with MXR power supplies; FC told me this when i thought my SW was defective because it was hella noisy and asked to send it in for evaluation. so if the lo-fi boxes don't like this PS, i guess i could always go back to a daisy chain LOL.

if it turns out that the lo-fi FEB configuration can't work, i'll tear it up and start again with the AD and expression pedal, the Foxrox Octron bass box. and the RV-3. hopefully the Shallow Water will work OK. the Stereo Memory Man Secret Santa brought me would go nicely in there.

the dark horse in the pedalboard situation is my other Secret Santa box, the Stomping Stones Virus. if i take to this one it could seriously mess with my fuzz hierarchy because it can do raspy overdrive, broken 90s indie band far, far away, and Harmonic Percolator-on-crack sounds. it has that kind of grainy quality that a HP has, but is if anything even more extreme. there's shit in there that would scare Steve Albini. it's wild enough that it might outdo the 3699. hopefully i'll get to test it soon...the demos are absolutely nuts.

have i mentioned how sick and fucking tired i am of rearranging and rewiring pedalboards this week yet? i really don't want to spend what will probably be an entire day fucking with the front-end board and its various components, but i can't live with the noise problem and really need the AD and bass box for my loops. Becky gave me a really nice coffee table for Christmas that features a top with hydraulic-cylinder-damped brackets that allow you to raise the top to a good height for a worksurface, so at least it should be easier on my back.

and really, it wouldn't break my heart to be reduced to a two-board setup. i've been finding it tough to work in three different directions, especially when i'm twiddling with the Attack Decay on my right and also dealing with looping on the left. i just don't want to lose the AD, and i have to have a bass box.

is this table not absolutely badass? it also has storage drawers on the front side, which is the side the top opens towards so you can use the top while sitting on the sofa. it could potentially also be used as a multi-tiered pedal array, but i have enough trouble dealing with effects already that i don't need to go 3D.

how do you like the CH1

it's everything i need from a chorus. it doesn't do flashy programmable digital stuff, but it just plain sounds good. and since i run a mono signal all the modern stereo choruses are largely irrelevant to me. as you can see my taste in modulation runs toward old-school analog stuff. the Villanova is a luscious optical univibe that apparently is now super rare and insanely expensive, like Lovetone levels of crazy. the TC SCF is so old it runs on 120V AC power. the CH-1 is the chorus circuit from the Roland JC series amps in a box, and what more do i need chorus-wise that i can't get from the modulation functions on my delays and the Soft Focus reverb? and the PM7 does lovely slightly wobbly phasing as well as insane shit in mode 3. to me, modulation is one of those areas where i don't feel digital modeling truly captures what the older physical circuits do...it's too regular, you know? i think part of what makes older modulation units intriguing is that the signal varies subtly with every pass through the circuit. if you play the same note through the CH-1 ten times at the same point in the duty cycle they'll all sound just a teensy bit different; do the same with one of todays $300+ digital units and they'll all be exactly the same.

I'm not gonna post a pic of the current pile of wires and pedals, but this is where I'm currently add with my switcher based setup. I'm actually very boring and just use gain and delay most of the time, with a bit of micro or macro looping on the end.
Trying to cut out some redundancies, I've got two delays and two reverbs, a shorter subtle, and a longer textural version of each.
My "clean" setting has been the klon as a boost to match my dirt with the RV2 adding a tiny bit of hall. The RV3 is set very wet on the plate as a soaring lead thing. I've just started playing with a compressor as I got a good deal on the orange (which is probably fine to replace the RV3's lead duties) and I could use that to get the cleans up to match the high gain stuff too, so could also kick off the klon, or use it as an overdrive, which I am sort of missing between my other dirt, although having it after everything else as a boost is good for pushing that volume to jump out.

The carbon copy is serving for a bit of texture in places, where as the el cap is more for building up washes of psych.
I could probably just combine the two boss reverbs and the mxr, sticking my HX stomp in that slot, which could then serve as a bit of a Swiss army knife for anything I need.
Looking to stick an analog octaver in front too, how are you finding the Foxrox @dubkitty?

I was given one of those walrus fundamental distortions, I really like it, it made it to the board! Thing just adds filth with my rig (parallel bass and treble pedal board chains for bass and treble into a Mesa 400+ into a 2x15 &1x18) it turns everything into a fun overblown stoner/doom thang

i just preordered an Analog Music Company So High So Low high-pass/low-pass filter that a shop is taking preorders on for February delivery. it's everything you'd want a lo-fi box to be. i don't usually get all that enthused about new pedals any more, but this is something special. i'm gonna sound like i'm playing through a pay phone from the 1970s. puts the "radio" in Radiohead.

https://www.littleboxeffects.com/produc ... amp-filter



for some reason posting YouTube links is acting even funkier than usual...in order to get this to post i had to Google search it and post the link from the Google result; C&Ping from the address on the actual YouTube page didn't work.

After using pretty much just a Line6 HX Effects for ages, I decided to ditch it and get back into some proper pedals again. This is what I am messing with at the moment. Had an RV-3 years ago, decided I wanted to revisit it and keep one in my collection going forward so I bought another one. It's still a fun/useful pedal, but not without it's quirks, and the reverb decay is far from natural sounding, at least by todays standards. It does make me want to try the EQD Dispatch Master, which is generally touted as a good modern equivalent. The centre pedal is a Rat clone I build on stripboard. The Soft Focus is honestly just a great all round reverb. Despite lacking different modes or a bunch of knobs, you can still get a good range of distinct sounds out of it. All three pedal turned on is a good time