DefJef
THBC Moderator
Due to musical differences I've decided I can't work with myself any more.
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Post by DefJef on Aug 3, 2021 8:49:58 GMT
Just won (?!) this pedal on Ebay. Wasn't looking for it but had a rush of blood to the head as it was in its final 30 minutes when I stumbled across it! Just long enough to listen to it on YouTube whilst rapidly reading some reviews. I was actually looking for a used C9, B9 or Mel9 pedal as they fascinate me, but when I heard this guy's YouTube demo of this thing I could hear an awful lot of things that I liked. It should arrive this week and then I can see if it is awfully more complicated than I can bear - since purchasing it I've noticed there seems to be quite a lot of options that concern 'pressing-this-whilst-holding-that', and those operations can drive me nuts. However, when it arrives I shall be doing my best to record a section in the middle of a new song. This will require me recording the chords in a backwards order to how they currently are written, soloing over them and then reversing the whole lot ... then learning to play the solo as it sounds in its reverse form using this pedal for live use. If that was all it did I wouldn't have purchased it but, listening to the other things it does on this video really seemed inspiring. I love the Slow Gear Boss effect anyway but this thing takes that beyond. It should at least be a lovely exploration. If it fails to tickle my fancy for long enough then it can always be flipped back to Ebay.
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DefJef
THBC Moderator
Due to musical differences I've decided I can't work with myself any more.
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Post by DefJef on Aug 6, 2021 10:09:48 GMT
Well it arrived and after two days with it I am on the edge of flipping it on ebay. I find the 'poly' mode pretty much unusable. Always being severely allergic to 'digitalness' in a sound that has made me fall out with every Digitech product I ever owned, this function on the EHX pedal seems to add a really nasty metallic ring to everything. Makes me quickly want to switch it off, which is a shame because a polyphonic option would be a really great idea if it sounded nice. So let's look at the things it is best at: a slow fade in or violining effect it does well, just like my Boss Slow Gear or my volume pedal. The decay function will do a dramatic cut off of the sound right through to a long natural fade and so, in theory, you can balance those two things to get your backwards tape sound. In 'mono' mode this envelope restarts every time you pluck a note, in the dreaded sounding 'poly' mode each note gets its own envelope so they can overlap each other which would be fantastic if those notes sounded as nice as they did in 'mono' mode. But what I found most frustrating was the fact that I couldn't control the time between the attack and the decay. It seems to me that once the attack has fully opened up then the decay instantly begins to kick in. Fine if you want a slow to medium fade in and then a fast or slow fade out. But what if you want a slow to medium fade in then a held note and then a fast or slow decay? Can't seem to do it. There seems to be no element of just the unaffected signal available. It's either attacking or decaying. Perhaps somewhere deep inside the programming guts of this thing I can access a function like that to retard the decay effect from starting but I've not found it so far. I was also disappointed, even defeated, by the banjo/koto effect of very fast attack and very fast decay. It's fine if you pluck notes slowly with plenty of strength so that the sensitivity knob registers the pluck, but if you want to play banjo rolls as I did, I found that the pedal just couldn't keep up with my fingers. To be fair the instructions do say that, in 'mono' mode, you may need to mute strings from ringing so as not to stop the pedal's sensitivity from recognising a new pluck, but that's pretty much impossible to do when playing banjo rolls - your fingers are too busy plucking to be muting too! I wondered if one option might be to use my DIY sponge mute clipped on to the bridge of my tele, but up until now I have been using that to get a rough simulation of banjoey stuff anyway. Rather like two stones being used to kill one bird here. Perhaps a hair scrunchy up the top end might suit? I doubt it. Option 2 in getting this banjo effect is to enter the dreaded 'poly' mode where perhaps the metallic ring is a plus to recreating a banjoesque sound? Well here things got differently frustrating and rather glitchy with nasty artefacts, not always keeping up with my fingers. Not nice to my ears at all. A compressor before the pedal might help this though by providing a strong consistent signal for the sensitivity knob to recognise so I'll be looking into that. There are other interesting functions to this pedal though that I will need to explore further for their ability to provide some new noises. It has an expression pedal socket that may provide me with better control of the attack/decay function but will require more work input from me to play whilst singing too. Oh help! There is an inbuilt drastic fuzz feature too with some tone adjustment inherited from EHX's Big Muff that seems interesting and might justify this pedal in itself. That fuzz also has an inbuilt compressor that can be switched on or off with some complex mixture button holds and presses. I've not tried digging deep on that yet either although a bit of fuzz blended in to the signal really did improve a simulated cello or synth sound. And talking of blending, there is a blend knob so you can mix between dry and wet signal. This I found little use for yet in the clean sounds but might well be very useful when using the fuzz. And finally there is the very interesting effects send and return pair or sockets on the left hand side of the pedal where you can plug in some extra effects. I've not even explored here yet but there are some choices available in this loop over how you want an order of events to happen. I am only imagining what things might happen here but in my mind there may be a nice chance to create some dynamic sound effects here. I am imagining a fuzz that perhaps swells in to the end of a clean note or a pitch shifted note that swells in to a clean one. Maybe even an octave higher note that swells into the decay of an overdriven note to simulate feedback? Or an octave lower one that might just be hugely annoying? Or tremolo just at the end of a note? Or a fuzzy start to each note attack but clean thereafter? Who knows?
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