philbymon wrote:Man, I have a tough time seeing the words when the text is red on black! I may be the only guy with this problem on here, cuz I'm slightly color-blind, but your myspace page is REALLY hard for me to navigate without highlighting it all.
I appreciate you mentioning that. I'll have to make a change when I can.
philbymon wrote:The Fuzz vid is better, but your voice fades out when you go to make adjustments.
WOW! The Tube Crusher vid has some serious volume issues, imho. I realize that the nature of the pedal requires some veriance, but I was raising & lowering the volume to keep up without blasting my ear holes.
The Repeater does that volume thing a bit, too. This is less obvious in the Copper Clipper.
yeah, but I'm trying to show the range of things you can do... the tube crusher has a huge vol increase when you lift the diodes... this makes it perfect as a clean boost or an OD and I wanted that to come across... but I hear what ur saying... perhaps too much of a variance!
philbymon wrote:One question, Mike - I've noticed that many of these pedals, both yours & the ones out there for general sale, have HUGE volume discrepencies between the effect & the lack thereof, &, for me, it's often a big problem getting the settings just right. Can you limit the difference without messing with all the buttons on any pedals? I mean, when I want a little boost, I often get a HUGE one when going from clean to dirty or whatever. I've scared some ppl by hitting the wrong button at the wrong time, & I'd like to avoid that in the future.
I know - I'm sounding like a rank amateur, which I am, when it comes to all the effects out there, but I'd bet that I'm not in the minority where it comes to intimate knowledge of what the pedals do &/or how they work.
When you start talking "germanic diodes" I have no idea what you're talking about.
on my multifx setup... I always hated how when you go from one patch to another it changes vol... so at one point I tried going thru each patch and setting them all to the sm vol - this had two outcomes:
1) when you set them all to the highest vol you'd get dist on the clean ones or they just couldn't reach the sm vol
2) when you drop down the loud ones to meet the softer ones you wouldn't get the tone you originally set out for
now the delay doesn't have a vol knob (it could) but the dif in vol is so minute that it's likely not a dif in vol at all, but rather a dif in treble as the internal buffer kicks in.
most of these pedals have a vol knob... and you COULD set them to exact input gain... but the reality is it sounds better when you are boosting your amp with a little vol + adding in distortion.
you COULD toss a comp/limiter at the end of your chain to keep absolute consistency... but again this would stop you from driving the amp with a bit of vol- and no matter what amp it is(if it's tube) - a VHT, Marshal, boogie, 5150, supro, bassman, deluxe reverb - it sounds better when the front end is goosed with a little vol.
now, another way to try to even things out that has worked pretty good for me is to have a true bypass switch and have your clean tone set on one loop and the dist tone on the other... then you put a clean boost on the clean side to equalize the volumes between the two... b4 either loop you have a compressor, and after either loop you have chorus, rev, delay etc.
afa germanium diodes... most folks that are into expensive boutique pedals know the keyword germanium basically means more rare and more expensive. germanium is a semiconductor. very few mass produced pedals feature germanium anything because it's typically not available from normal electronics sources as the best germanium 'stuff' is often new old stock and in limited supply (hard to make a line of pedals and then run out of one of the main components).
tone snobs tend to prefer germanium to silicon because it sounds 'warmer'. Personally, I find that both have qualities that I like.
