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i call it the "front-end board" because, well, it goes in front of the main board. it has to do because the Octave Multiplexer hates anything in front of it (and doesn't love life in general) and i need everything there to go through the Attack Decay's effects loop, which takes everything in the loop and applies the attack/decay envelopes to the entire signal on that board. it's really lovely sometimes when the gently degraded signal swells into a huge reverb setting on the RV-3. i don't always use it; it was always intended as an add-on module for pre-processing, and started with the AD which i got from an ILF Secret Santa. since it wouldn't work as part of the big board it needed somewhere to live. i've used the OM for faux bass on loops for years; it used to be part of my first late 00s iteration of the multi-looper concept. from there the question became "what can i do that will sound interesting without being such a sloppy sound that it sounds bad when run through the main board?" the obvious things to work with were fidelity and modulation, and the Shallow Water and Instant Lo-Fi Junky mess with both without being overbearing. it should be particularly good for creating varied textures in the loops.

the entire setup taken together is not unlike the idea of a modular synth with a multi-function looper on the end, and in fact i approach the board layouts like a synth signal path: the main board goes waveform, filter, modulation, time; the front-end board goes octave, envelope, modulation, signal degradation (so sort of filters), time.

i'm really interested in bi-amping. do you have a crossover or just a splitter?

I recently put this lil ziggurat together expressly for djenting on my dJackson short scale "Minion" bass. It djents the fuck.




The photobombing puppy is Bizzy. He likes to run around my feet and to djent in his own lil way

Djpuppy is djgorgous, & so is that board!

Looks heavy as AF Fuck.

dubkitty wrote:i call it the "front-end board" because, well, it goes in front of the main board. it has to do because the Octave Multiplexer hates anything in front of it (and doesn't love life in general) and i need everything there to go through the Attack Decay's effects loop, which takes everything in the loop and applies the attack/decay envelopes to the entire signal on that board. it's really lovely sometimes when the gently degraded signal swells into a huge reverb setting on the RV-3. i don't always use it; it was always intended as an add-on module for pre-processing, and started with the AD which i got from an ILF Secret Santa. since it wouldn't work as part of the big board it needed somewhere to live. i've used the OM for faux bass on loops for years; it used to be part of my first late 00s iteration of the multi-looper concept. from there the question became "what can i do that will sound interesting without being such a sloppy sound that it sounds bad when run through the main board?" the obvious things to work with were fidelity and modulation, and the Shallow Water and Instant Lo-Fi Junky mess with both without being overbearing. it should be particularly good for creating varied textures in the loops.

the entire setup taken together is not unlike the idea of a modular synth with a multi-function looper on the end, and in fact i approach the board layouts like a synth signal path: the main board goes waveform, filter, modulation, time; the front-end board goes octave, envelope, modulation, signal degradation (so sort of filters), time.

i'm really interested in bi-amping. do you have a crossover or just a splitter?

Ah, okay. The modular synth approach is cool. I might try something like this too in a more experimental board I plan to build.

For bi-amping I only use a splitter. The amps each have their distinctive role frequency-wise, so a crossover would be pretty obsolete. The separation is done with the amps settings anyway. I really love to play with two amps and two different sounds at the same time, especially with the Bass VI. It's like being half a band. You should try it. Just make sure the splitter has a ground lift.

i'm planning on implementing that as soon as i get a bass amp, which means probably in the spring. i think "crossover" because i work for a consumer electronics retailer and write about car stereos and subwoofers there, but i've seen a number of posts from bassists in particular who use a crossover to split between amps assigned to frequency ranges. i think that eliminating intermodulation by using a strict crossover would be good for my applications because there's already an impressively large number of potential points of signal degradation and dense loops inevitably get noisy as well, so i feel like it's wise to keep the utility points i can control as clean as possible. that's why i use active splitter/summing boxes with isolated channels on the looping board and went to isolated power supplies throughout in the last few months.

I got a Boredbrain Transmutron with designs on setting up a stereo treble/bass effects line but haven't gotten around to trying it out yet.

finally ordered the remaining cables needed for the looping board. of course the local shops didn't have what i needed...don't you love it when a shop carries only 6", 8", and 30" cables and then complains about online sales? because it's my life of course this was only the beginning of the complex problems. i went to Sweetwater only to discover that you can't filter pedalboard patch cables by length. thus, i had to look at all 219 product pages to find 18" and 24" cables. beyond the obvious irritation factor it particularly ticked me off because one of the things i do at my job at a online consumer electronics retailer is writing and editing Microsoft SQL code to filter the products on our website. after 45 delightful minutes of plonking around i finally got my order sorted. i was just starting an email when a Sweetwater dude rang me. so i did about ten minutes of consciousness-raising with one of SW's slower sales reps about the faults of the Pedalboard Patch Cables category, how inconvenient it was, that i could literally write a filter for that function in 10 minutes, and what appallingly crap customer service all this was. it took him a bit to get it.

(SW) i'm looking at the category page for guitar cables, and the filter is right there.
(me) yes, but i'm talking specifically about the pedalboard patch cables category, so your guitar cables page is irrelevant because it doesn't list pedalboard patch cables. you need a length filter on this specific category page.
(SW) ???

eventually i think i got through to him and he said he'd pass it off to the web team. i swear nobody knows how to do any damn job any more. it's actually OK that the cables won't arrive till sometime next week because that gives me an excuse not to work on wiring the board while my shoulder is still fucked up. sometime around Thanksgiving weekend the new era begins. assuming USPS doesn't send my stuff to Missoula, Montana which really wouldn't surprise me at this point.

I'm not doing much at the moment, so taking the opportunity to dig out some of my older, unloved pedals and give them a chance to impress me

at some point i need to go through the four shoeboxes and ask myself "self, is there any likelihood you're ever going to plug this in again?" it's hard to cut loose of stuff because i've always believed in having as many options as possible, but the likelihood of me using some of it as a solo looper as compared to someone who intended to write and perform shoegaze is yet to be determined. but then i'd have to deal with the whole selling-online thing, and i just don't care enough about money to put myself through all that.

Paul_C wrote:I'm not doing much at the moment, so taking the opportunity to dig out some of my older, unloved pedals and give them a chance to impress me

Thant dark bitquest Is

How do you like the Reverse CBA pedal? Reverse delay always seemed very specific to me, cool for occasional use in a multi-function delay but i couldn't justify having a pedal just for that.

Dowi wrote:

Paul_C wrote:I'm not doing much at the moment, so taking the opportunity to dig out some of my older, unloved pedals and give them a chance to impress me

Thant dark bitquest Is

How do you like the Reverse CBA pedal? Reverse delay always seemed very specific to me, cool for occasional use in a multi-function delay but i couldn't justify having a pedal just for that.

I like it a lot so far - it's on the board at the moment so I can spend some time learning what it can do.

I done made a board for the first time in forever

Vintage EHX kick with some extra tasty things thrown in.

Come at me bros (and fembros)

funny how sometimes funky old devices that have major limitations still wind up being The Sound. i'm tripping on the Fripp-in-a-box, as they called it back then.

the looping board is still going slowly. i haven't been able to do a lot until the last couple of days because my shoulder is still somewhat fucked from the accident and i can't really pick up or hold anything heavier than a padded mailer with my right hand. i'm really tired of doing a layout that looks fine until one piece doesn't quite fit, requiring a whole new round of visualizing where things will fit before actually tearing stuff up. also not enjoying pulling velcroed pedals off the board with 1.2 hands. my pedals have moved around more on here than British travellers. in retrospect it would have been better to buy a larger board rather than recycling the Pedaltrain Jr. which was my first board. i didn't realize how much space all this hoo-haw would require. but i do take pride in being able to cram the maximum amount of devices into the smallest reasonable space and hate spending money for cheapness and environmental concerns. also, a larger board would make it even more difficult to find cables of the appropriate length, and i refuse to run up special cables. when would i ever use a 34.5" cable again? theoretically all that's left is mounting the PS to the board and wiring the DC power cables, but again that's complicated by needing to pick up and turn over the board. i'm trying to get done before Thanksgiving so i can spend Black Friday lost in Loop Land. couldn't be done soon enough.