the watmm GAS thread

[xox]

i was talking about distortion but after watching hundreds of millions yt videos i think that i maybe need something fuzzier. well, i basically need something crazy for live to use it in parallel on a mixer, so nothing polite but destructive that can sound interesting. maybe still something like wmd geiger counter, z.vex fuzz factory, iron ether frantabit / oxide, lal super oscillo fuzz / envelope noise generator, rml efc distortion / 432k / electron fuzz, dwarfcraft the great destroyer / necromancer, but i dont have the money atm for the majority of them.. :(

the ideal pedal would but the one that can work as an over drive, distortion and ultra-blasting-wave shaper-fuzz-death-distraction, all at once., everything for 99 euros (vat and shipping included)  :) 

 

i'll try to look up those on reverb.com . i'm a very impatient person. i could wait a bit, collect the money and buy any of those pedals...

Edited January 3, 2018 by xox

[TubularCorporation]

i was talking about distortion but after watching hundreds of millions yt videos i think that i maybe need something fuzzier. well, i basically need something crazy for live to use it in parallel on a mixer, so nothing polite but destructive that can sound interesting. maybe still something like wmd geiger counter, z.vex fuzz factory, iron ether frantabit / oxide, lal super oscillo fuzz / envelope noise generator, rml efc distortion / 432k / electron fuzz, dwarfcraft the great destroyer / necromancer, but i dont have the money atm for the majority of them.. :(

the ideal pedal would but the one that can work as an over drive, distortion and ultra-blasting-wave shaper-fuzz-death-distraction, all at once., everything for 99 euros (vat and shipping included)  :) 

 

i'll try to look up those on reverb.com . i'm a very impatient person. i could wait a bit, collect the money and buy any of those pedals...

 

Try a Fuzzrite, it's a really unusual circuit.  I forget exactly how it works but it's tapping a signal from to different places in the circuit and has a control to blend them.   In the middle position you get kind of weird, metallic, broken sounding fuzz, and t the extremes you get either a really harsh, buzzy fuzz or a more dark, heavy, Big Muff territory kind of thing.

 

The Fuzz Factory is cool but it's really just a Fuzz Face with some mods and a modified EHX LPB-1 booster in front of it, it's a cool pedal but a bit over hyped IMHO.  The Devi Ever stuff is nuts, a lot of it has modes that border on circuit bent, often nearly unstable and usually very different sounding depending on the input signal, but they also tend to do pretty conventional sounds too.

 

Dan Armstrong Green Ringer into almost any fuzz or distortion is crazy. 

 

Guyatone TZ-1 is oe I forgot to mention, small, not that expensive and great at doing extreme sounds.  IIRC instead of squaring off the waveform it is shaping it into a sort of sawtooth, and with certain settings and input signals you start to get some octaves coming out o it, but it's not an actual octave fuzz.  I think it's a loose clone of one of the Tone Bender pedals but I forget which one.  I really,really regret selling mine years ago but I'm pretty sure they're still being made.  Big Muff i also great but maybe a bit polite - it's very, very saturated but in an almost smooth way. If you can track down a reissue Fender Blender those things sound great and can get in to really extreme fuzz, both bright  and thick depending on the mode.  Plus there's a built in wet/dry mix.  They didn't last long though, so they might be expensive now (I got mine in a trade around 2008 and it's one of the keepers).

 

A Rat or Turbo Rat might actually be a good choice if you're looking for something rougher.

 

I've still got about a half dozen fuzzes from the band days when I was doing a lot of trading, I'll definitely throw some demos of the x0xb0x through the more extreme ones together tomorrow for you.

 

 

I really, really like fuzz.

[thawkins]

Thanks for the fuzz chat, got me thinking that I should order some kits and solder something together again.

[TubularCorporation]

Thanks for the fuzz chat, got me thinking that I should order some kits and solder something together again.

 

https://store.generalguitargadgets.com/kits/kits-octave/gro-complete-kit.html

 

Only like $10 more than sourcing your own parts (and that's if you're careful about shipping costs and do all your own drilling on the enclosure), and sounds great. Order the large enclosure though, I got the small one and it's a really tight fit, I actually had to file down the edge of the PCB to even get it in. Sounds great on guitar, great on synths, ridiculous in front of a fuzz.  Chris from Airwindows did a video that sold me on them. I never realized they were such a big part of Zappa's guitar sound throughout the 70s, I'd always chalked a lot of that up to using a wah pedal to bring out overtones (which he also did but apparently a lot of it was Green Ringer).

 

I just noticed they have an Ampeg Scrambler kit for $60, and that is pretty hard to resist.  I've always wanted to try one of those, if I'm not mistaken it was the signature fuzz sound of Leafhound and the first Cactus LP (same guitarist).

 

EDIT: a lot of years ago this Shin-Ei Companion Fuzz kit was the very first kit I ever built and it sounded pretty excellent, but I traded it for a MidiNES cart because the volume drop made it hard to use live.

 

I wish I'd taken a photo though I suck a hand colored print of an advertisement for fake sideburns from the back pages of a late 60s bubblegum pop magazine (not Tiger Beat, but similar) on the front of it and I remember it looked pretty good.

 

 

 

Anyhow, I've got a backlog of PCBs hoarded away, so no time for any of that.  The next thing is going to either be a G-SSL compressor (I've got almost everything, just need an enclosure, a transformer and a few pots) or the mighty Jurgen Haible Krautrock Phaser.

Edited January 4, 2018 by RSP

[sweepstakes]

Appreciate all this distortion talk. Being away from my gear has made me realize my lack of tone-shaping tools. I want a parametric EQ (or two) more than anything, though. I'm wondering if the MI Shelves might be one of the more practical choices even if it means taking the eurocrack plunge.

[TubularCorporation]

Well, I'm in the middle of a blizzard and didn't have anything else I needed to get done so I recorded a bunch of fuzz demos. I was going to put them up on Soundcloud but it turned out longer than I expected so for now it's just a single audio file in Dropbox:

 

CD audio FLAC

 

320kbps MP3

 

 

It's a bog standard acid line on the x0xb0x being played through 6 different fuzz and distortion pedals, a Green Ringer clone (made from the kit I linked above) and finally, the Green Ringer into a Fuzz Face.  Except as noted, I bypassed the pedal(s) any time I adjusted any of the controls on the x0xb0x, so while they're on any tonal changes you hear are coming from the pedal controls.  Recorded it direct with no processing other than normalizing the clip for each pedal.  It's not a scientific test or anything so I didn't really put any effort in to level matching or anything, for each pedal I start the pattern, turn on the pedal, tweak the pedal a bit, bypass it, adjust the x0xb0x controls, engage the pedal again, and so on.  I tried to get as much variety as I could out of each pedal for a few different x0xb0x sounds (one or two each of low cutoff/low resonance/minimal filter envelope, and high resonance/low cutoff/extreme filter envelope.  The pattern itself isn't anything special, the main goal was to have some variety in it to showcase how the pedals responded. X0xb0x volume was at around 75% except where noted.

 

 

#1 - 0:00 - Boss PW-2 Power Driver

Not much to say here except it sounded a lot better than I remembered (and way better than it does on guitar) and might actually be my favorite of the lot for this job.  It's also the cheapest to get, so that's convenient. I forgot to switch from sawtooth to square wave on the x0xb0x at all for this one.

 

#2 - 2:24 - Vintage Mosrite Fuzz Rite pedal (version 3 or 4, I forget which; probably from around 1970)

Only one control to tweak on this one ("Depth" which isn't so much a gain control as a weird blend between two different points in the circuit), the volume control was maxed out the whole time. This is one of my favorite fuzz pedals of all time for guitar (and the only fnacy, vintage distortion I've owned) but wasn't all that exciting here (and the output was really low compare to the others, a lot of these early pedals are really picky about the impedance of the stuff that's connected to them and I suspect that's why because on guitar it can get quite loud).

 

#3 - 4:38 - Reissue Fender Blender

Lots of controls to mess with on this one: tone, sustain (i.e. the amount of distortion, just like the Big Muff sustain control), wet/dry mix and the "tone boost" switch that makes it a lot brighter and louder and is on most of the time because it sounded better - you'll know when it gets turned off.  This was the winner in terms of variety in my book, but the recessed knobs are awkward and on mine they're really stiff, too.

 

#4 - 9:41 - 80s Turbo Rat (with the original chip, apparently Internet pedal enthusiasts prefer this to the later ones but I've never compared - the bass player in a band I was in was throwing this one out, it's the only Rat I've ever owned and the only one I ever will).

Nice but hardly any variety and the tone control was actually pretty mild.

 

#5 - 12:05 - Zoom PD-01 Power Drive

Starts with the tone controls at their half way (flat) settings and the gain all the way down, which switches it into a flat, clean boost mode.  As soon as you turn the gain up on this thing it engages an additional circuit that gives it a bit of a Tube Screamer style midrange bump.  Most of the time I was alternating between full gain and about halfway up, and then tweaking the tone controls individually and together.  IT's a pretty classiy sounding traditional distortion pedal with a lot of variety but nothing unexpected.

 

#6 - 14:49 General Guitar Gadgets Green Ringer kit

As I described earlier, this isn't a distortion, it's a full wave rectifier - basically the octave part of an octave fuzz without the fuzz.  No controls at all. Very dependant on the type of sound you feed in to it (and on a monosynth you don't get to hear what happens when it gets more than one note at the same time and goes into completely enharmonic, metallic, ring mod like noise).  This is a pretty basic demo of it, if I had been tweaking the x0x controls in real time it would have been a lot more weird and lively sounding but this gives you an idea.  Sometimes it pitches everything up an octave, sometimes it makes it sound kind of ring modulated but without pitch shifting, and sometimes it does something in between, all entirely dependent on the input signal.

 

#7 - 16:02 - DIY Germanium Fuzz Face clone.  First thing I built.  All carbon composition resistors at stock values with a pair of matched (but higher gain than optimal) transistors and a bias control and fairly shoddy point to point wiring.  Also there's a bit of dish sponge in there to keep the battery from rattling around (but it's the kin with the scrubby stuff on one side, so maybe it adds extra fuzz too).  Because this thing really isn't meant for line level there wasn't much of a difference between any of the settings on the Fuzz knob, so I kept that on full and controlled the amount o fuzz by adjusting the volume control on the x0xb0x instead.  All of the tonal changes come from that and the Bias knob(which is meant for temperature compensation - Germanium transistors are really temperature sensitive, which is part of why they went out of fashion in mass produced pedals early on - but it can also be used to change the sound of the circuit quite a bit, from a kind of quiet, fizzy, almost broken sound at the minimum setting, to a VERY loud (don't turn up your speakers/headphones too loud for this one), very muffled and bassy sound at maximum.  The normal Fuzz Face sound is somewhere between 11:00 and 1:00 on the control, depending on room temperature.

 

#8 - 18:35 - Green Ringer into Fuzz Face.

For this one I set the Fuzz Face up with the Fuzz control on full, the Bias at around 1:00 and the Volume for roughly unity, and then didn't touch any of the controls on the pedals at all and tweaked the x0xb0x knobs for a while instead, to demonstrate how the Green Ringer reacts to the input signal and what it does when you feed it in to a fuzz.  This setup is a bit like the Fender Blender actually, but rawer.

 

 

 

I didn't bother to do a Big Muff because I've got a black Russian one right now but I got it from a coworker who got it from a guitar shop that's out of business now, and someone there had done some kind of diode mod on it but allegedly got part of it wrong, so there's a big rotary switch that changes the distortion characteristics depending on where it's set (but doesn't change it at all on some settings) and I don't know which setting is stock so I figured it wouldn't b the most useful thing to demo; at least with the Fuzz Face there are plenty of similar clones and kits around, and there's so much variation between any two pairs of transistors you never really know what any particular one will sound like anyhow.

 

 

Hope this is useful!

 

 

P.S. if the vinyl crackles weren't a giveaway, that's not my voice in the bumpers between pedals, it's from an old DeWolfe sound effects record of early 1970s computer room and office field recordings.

Edited January 4, 2018 by RSP

[xox]

thanx rsp!!! will listen to it asap

[TubularCorporation]

I just listened to it myself and the Boss Power Driver is definitely my favorite of the bunch.

 

There's one on eBay right now for $35 with no bids and less than a day left, and a couple more under $50.

Edited January 4, 2018 by RSP

[kakapo]

The Elektron analog drive is going cheap these days, seems you can get one for less than £/$200.

[xox]

rsp, great demos! thnak you mang!

still, i believe that i wont be in peace until i buy something crazy (enough) like the geiger counter.

[TubularCorporation]

rsp, great demos! thnak you mang!

still, i believe that i wont be in peace until i buy something crazy (enough) like the geiger counter.

 

I wish I still had that Devi Ever SM Fuzz so I could demo it.

 

Unfortunately, it looks like the recent versions of some of her pedals have simplified controls.  Like, for example, the SM Fuzz was a stripped down, minimalist version of the Soda Meiser, but the version of the Soda Meiser that's currently available actually has FEWER controls than he SM Fuzz.   I'd still recommend checking out her stuff though, everything I've tried has been really great and can definitely get into some pretty extreme areas, or at least they used to be able to back in the early days, what I'm hearing now seems to lean more toward conventional guitar sounds and seem to be more one-trick ponies. The old ones would get into completely alien stuff, where the envelope f the input signal would get inverted at certain frequencies, and things would start to sound timestretched or reversed in a really dynamically responsive way (even though most of the pedals were just a fuzz or distortion circuit with some weird modifications that "broke" it).  The new ones don't seem to do stuff like that, and that's a shame.

 

If you can track down one of these by all means jump on it:

 

[xox]

i'll look up those, thnx!

 

but tbh, usually when i see less than 3 knobs on a pedal i loose my interest immediately

 

btw, have you heard/tried the great destroyer from dwarfcraft? that one seems interesting

[TubularCorporation]

I'm not too up on modern fuzzes and distortions, to be honest.  Filters re another matter but when it comes to distortion I find minimal is better for me. Depends on what you're going for for sure, but I like a fuzz/distortion that you control primarily with the nature of the input signal.

[TubularCorporation]

Anyhow, I just picked up my $12 compressor and $12 reverb from the post office and gave them a try.  They're definitely noteworthy.

 

 

The compressor (it's a Crate Pro Audio thing but they don't brand it on the front panel)actually sounds surprisingly good on the Tanzmaus I used to test it.  Really clean but not without character, and generally worked really well for getting things sounding punchy or snappy or whatever you'd usually do with a compressor.  I had a 90s DBX166 for a while and this thing sounded much better than the DBX.  Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working right in stereo mode, at least not with the signal I was using.  In dual mono it was great but in stereo, the more gain reduction the quieter the left channel got until it was completely silent when it was really smashing the signal.  Not bad for $12, though, I'll definitely use it for treating samples and maybe the other issue was a matter of user error or something (possibly because the Tanzmaus was connected with a Y cable so he sleeve connections on the compressor inputs were shorted together via the Y cable shield?  Or maybe it needs a balanced input? Or maybe it was fried by the previous owner because one of the power supplies I got was the wrong one and was 12VAC instead of the 10VAC it should have been?)

 

The Audio-Centron is a whole other story.  I'm really glad I got this thing.  It looks like a NanoVerb clone but it isn't.  What it is, is just about the worst soundin digital reverb I've ever heard, but in a way I like.  Makes the NanoVerb sound like a vintage LExicon (that doesn't even feel like an exaggeration, to be honest).  At long reverb times (and they get up to the 20-30 second range on some of the algorithms) it just turns into this nasty, grainy wash but still has a sense of three dimensional space to it.  It's similar to the reverbs in the first generation Mini Kaoss Pad but without the obvious delay slaps/boinginess of those.  It doesn't sound like any other reverb I have or have had, and that makes it useful.  Also it doesn't hum or anything and has a surprising (and somewhat inscuritable) variety of i/o options:

 

 

 

This is some quality crap gear and I think it would be totally justifiable to pay up to $20 for either of them if you see one.

 

 

EDIT: also the knobs feel TERRIBLE when you turn them, like rubbing two pieces of cardboard together.

 

 

EDIT: definitely something wrong with the compressor, gain reduction is like 20dB less on the right channel than on the left when you feed it a mono signal in stereo mode. 

Edited January 8, 2018 by RSP

[psn]

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-and-electronic-music-production/1196469-ub-xa-synthesizer.html

 

 

[auxien]

^ 

 

For the first time in our 30 year history, we have decided to completely open up our company and share every step of the development process with you so you can ask questions while we will be seeking your opinions.
In fact we want you to participate in this end-to-end process so we can learn from you, but also for you to fully understand how such a synth is developed and manufactured.

ugh.

 

​The synth itself could be interesting of course. Maybe. But the 'open' process Uli is talking about there seems kind of...silly? I'm not sure why I read it and just wanted to barf but I did.

[TubularCorporation]

^ 

 

For the first time in our 30 year history, we have decided to completely open up our company and share every step of the development process with you so you can ask questions while we will be seeking your opinions.

In fact we want you to participate in this end-to-end process so we can learn from you, but also for you to fully understand how such a synth is developed and manufactured.

ugh.

 

​The synth itself could be interesting of course. Maybe. But the 'open' process Uli is talking about there seems kind of...silly? I'm not sure why I read it and just wanted to barf but I did.

 

Because it's marketing masquerading as some kind of altruistic gesture?  I felt the same way about the part talking about it being a "labor of love" that engineers would work at "in their free time" as if that's a good thing in the context of a fairly huge company.

 

 

I bet it will sound good though.

[auxien]

Yeah, that's gotta be it. Good point on the 'labor of love' shit too. 

[xox]

Uglier, pls!

 

:facepalm

[thawkins]

They probably want in on that Kickstarter style thing where you get people emotionally invested in the product way before it's ready so that later there is a bigger chance that they will buy it. I do like it though when makers genuinely show up on forums to discuss details and features with the larger public, but Behringer is like this huge company, I have a hard time believing this is not a PR thing before all else (unless they have done it before).

[Guest Chesney]

Especially when the deepmind was first touted as a Juno sounding replicate. It's obviously a better forward thinking synth but not what they set it out to be.

[xox]

Berrneghert loves you, little people! <3

[sheatheman]

It's like when I keep saying my record is coming out and it never does!

[Guest Chesney]

It's like when I keep saying my record is coming out and it never does!

I hear that! ha

 

 

Luckily though I have still been productive so i'm ok with it.

[sheatheman]

I've been extremely productive too