Quatschmacher

I’ve been following and contributing to this on thegearpage and am very excited about this. They’ll be at NAMM with it at the end of the month so there should be some videos soon.

Behold: Turn off the PLL and it’s essentially a lowpass version of the Pralines, though with individual resonances for each filter (the Pralines has just one, global resonance control).

@mr zed, now that you’ve joined the club, make sure you have the means to hook up to your PC by the time it arrives so you can try out all the great shared patches, either via an audio interface with MIDI ports or via a dedicated USB-MIDI adapter (there’s a list of ones already tested for compatibility on the Panda site).

Definitely check out the Enzo. I tried it the other day. It should do what you need. For example for your pitch shift needs, you could either turn the knob to shift pitch or use the expression morph function to just have a specific interval dialled in between the toe-up and toe-down positions.

I think this might be the way to go for me too, thanks for pointing it out.

Try TouchOSC first, it’s free and pretty powerful (though it has couple of quirks such as toggle buttons sending midi in both press and release with no way to disable one or the other). You could actually get a hardware MIDI controller for it as all parameter are controlled via CCs. There are some products which are just units with a bunch of knobs that can be freely assigned. I really hope Meris refine it too. Angelo seemed to be taking the stance that it was complete as is, which is a little disappointing - admittedly it’s pretty amazing the way it is but surely there’s room for improvement if the hardware and firmware allows. I certainly wouldn’t mind getting one. I wish this had been around when I first started buying pedals as it would have saved me much time and money (though I have enjoyed the journey and have learned a lot on the way).

I think I have to agree with @tonyxtiger that the Meris has tighter tracking than the FI. I found that fast octave switching seemed much more reliable. How are you finding yours, @Embra, now that you’ve had more time with it and used to own a FI?

I’ve just re-read the manual. I’m puzzled by the way presets have been implemented as it means it’s really easy to accidentally overwrite them. Presets are saved by pressing the “alt. function” button, so basically whenever you make an adjustment to one of the shift-function parameters (such as filter resonance), the preset gets overwritten. This seems a daft choice. It seems there’s no way to use a given preset as a springboard, tweak it to one’s liking and then save it as a new preset without losing the original one (unless you’ve already backed it up to a computer). Doesn't appear that you can the filter controlled by the envelope without having the ring mod also controlled by it (unless maybe adjusting ring mod via midi cc overrides the envelope). Also seems that there isn’t a way to further control the sensitivity of the envelope follower to the input signal. There’s no final level control! Just a switch between instrument level and line level output.

Just save the money and get the FI. You’ll only end up getting one eventually anyway! The Enzo is pretty damn cool too (I finally got to try one today alongside my FI - see my Enzo thread for a review).

FINALLY! I got to try one of these today. Here’s my take: this is a really cool pedal! It does a ridiculous amount of stuff. I had a solid 2.5 hours with it (with 15 minutes on my Future Impact for comparison). The basic waveforms sound fantastic and fat. Dialling in a bit of the modulation knob, (which introduces a second oscillator with increasing amount of detune) gives a very analogue-sounding gentle phasing, especially on the sawtooth. I was using a Mexican P with rounds and tracking was great. There were two notes (low F# and F) which caused multiple triggering but that may have been the bass itself. With the synth voices, the lowpass filters sound gorgeous, especially with resonance. This is the best sounding digital filter I’ve heard. The cutoff goes way low (probably 40Hz or less). It is very easy to dial in good sounds quickly, and great ones once you’ve got the shift functions down, which doesn’t take too long. (The main thing which tripped me up was the fact that some knobs do completely different things (in shift and normal mode) depending on whether the pedal is in dry (not bypassed), mono, poly or arp mode. I can see how it can be easy to quickly lose track of which knobs are set to where. For instance, I was wondering why the dry envelope filtered sound sounded a bit naff. It turns out I’d inadvertently switched compression on which killed all the dynamics. I think this happened because the shift knob on this unit was switching out at the slightest release of pressure (I was operating it one-handed, thumb on button, fingers on dials); I was trying to adjust a different parameter. The triggered envelope control has some pretty cool possibilities and is capable of a reasonable range of sounds, though it is still frustrating that there isn’t separate control over the attack and decay. Due to the fact there’s no (filter) sustain control, the fast envelopes cut off the sound quite abrubtly at the end. This might also be partly to do with the fact that there’s no separate envelope depth control. The envelope follower was quite disappointing and didn’t seem to have much of a range. (Perhaps there’s a setting to adjust input gain somewhere but I was only using the quick-start manual as opposed to the full one.) That was a shame as the filter on the dry bass sounded pretty good. Not as fat as my analogue pedals but actually pretty decent. I’m pretty sure the disappointment is due to the lack of envelope sensitivity though as it sounded really rather good when sweeping the filter knob manually. There’s portamento! This is cool. Sadly the scaling on the knob means there’s much more travel devoted to the longer times than to the shorter (and more useable-to-me times). I only played with the arp and poly modes briefly. Arp produced some pretty cool sounds. Ring mod sounds cool too. I’m not sure if there’s a way to decouple it from the envelope whilst still having the envelope controlling the filter, I’ll have to investigate further. Pitch shifter sounds cool, though I didn’t play it much. I put the synth into the highest register for lead sounds and I thought it played much more tightly than the FI. (I’m interested to hear if the new FI update will change that as there is to be a new and improved tracking algorithm.) I’m partly regretting not having bought this last week when the eBay 15% discount was offered. I didn’t buy it today but I may in future next time a similar discount comes around. Yes, it has its limitations but it the sounds it does make are pretty awesome. I still hope that the Meris people consider a future firmware update to add more envelope control and refine the envelope follower. Quatschmacher out. 

Isn’t the Bananana a digital pedal? Sometimes they can be fussy about sharing power. It might be that having certain combination of pedals on together is causing the Bananana to receive too little power which can cause all sorts of weirdness. I had a similar issue with a couple of Source Audio pedals after it turned out that another pedal sharing the power had much higher consumption than I realised.

I bought a couple of Voodoo Lab power cables from Paulo and, aside from delay from the Christmas post, all went smoothly with prompt, friendly and clear communication. I’d have no hesitation in dealing again. Many thanks!

New patches added.

I’d suggest playing with the parameters on the pedal itself to hear what effect they have on any given sound. That’ll help with things like cutoff, resonance, attack, decay, envelope depth etc. Have a play with some of the patches which only use a single oscillator and a single waveform first (some of mine are of this type and labelled as such). If you have an iOS device then I’d highly recommend getting the Moog Model D app and having a play with that. The Model D is a great, easy-to-understand interface from which you can quickly learn more about synthesis. I’m certainly no master synthesist but a little knowledge can go a long way. Better still would be to pick up a cheap hardware monosynth. We are spoiled for choice these days and for the cost of a pedal or two you can get something really powerful and easy to learn on. Also, check out the old SOS Synth Secrets column - collated into one PDF file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_mpRWF7AYVw03MxhDMls9HGJBwNv4h6J/view?usp=drivesdk

I’ve just uploaded 8 new patches I’ve made to the folder. I made these at the keyboard so have yet to see how we’ll they work on bass. My reason behind this was that I wanted to get them to sound like proper keyboard patches and that is best achieved at the keyboard. Also, these were all made using the new (as opposed to the vintage) filter. Edit - they work just fine on bass.

If anything it’ll be more complex as there’ll be a mod matrix, which will be amazing! If by “simpler to use” you mean having drag-and-drop interface for transferring patches then I totally agree with you.

Just for reference, the Future Impact is under £340 new from Thomann; used they go between £250-275.

No one said anything about price. The features requested were pitch shift, wah and synth. I’m just mentioning an option that’s out there.

Wunjo is a bit like that sometimes too. They have a DSI Pro 2 which is “on sale” at exactly the same price it’s always been there.

Or one of those 9v battery snap to 2.1mm centre negative cables that come as standard with the Voodoo Lab power supplies. You might need to reverse the polarity as the snap normally plugs into the pedal rather than the battery.