A/B/Y with Ernie Ball VPJR

[mathias]

Today while rearranging the cables on my rig for the millionth time, I was getting weird "something's on" amount of noise while my Ernie Ball VPJR volume pedal was all the way down. I tracked it down to the fact that my cheap tuner (non true bypass, buffers the signal through afaik), which I had accidentally attached the tuner-out from the volume pedal to the tuner's output jack instead of the input, as it should be. "Huh," I thought, "I wonder if this means that not only is this directly connected to the input at all times, but I can plug something else into the 'Tuner out' on the VPJR and use it to run something else through my guitar rig (circuit bent toys, buddha boxes, metronome, etc). I tested this idea with my guitar on the Tuner out jack, and the volume pedal controls whether this jack goes to output as well

It's not true A/B/Y, it's more like Y-blending, but if you turn off whatever is on the Tuner jack, it seems to be okay; there's no volume drop on the guitar from hooking stuff up as an 'input' on the Tuner jack.

Thinking of using this to run crazy stuff (aforementioned circuit bent toys & buddha boxes, contact mic with a simple altoid preamp in front of it) through guitar rig when I feel like it, an putting a simple stomp (momentary) killswitch on that line so that I can turn it off while I only want guitar signal.

[htsamurai]

thats mighty odd....im digging it though, let us know how it turns out bro

[mathias]

The tuner has a microphone on it, so you can tune acoustic guitars and such. I tried shouting into the mic while it was hooked up to output to the amp. It works as a really lofi microphone.


Edit 4/16/09: Planning to use this 'second' input with a little box I'm building, that I should clarify, is a momentary stomp switch that is only 'on' when I hold down the stomp switch with my foot. The same box will have an output running through it for the tuner to still connect to. Plan to run my 'noise rig' through this part of my setup, which includes contact mics, lofi microphones (these two things need little altoids-tin preamps I have yet to build), circuit-bent toys, buddha box, stylophone, etc.