Quatschmacher

I’ve been on this path for some time now. Gated fuzz is a key element as the gating replicates the on/off nature of a synth’s keypress. I’m using a Mastotron, 3Leaf Doom (with a TC Sentry to gate it) and the Emma Octo Nøjs. The latter two are also dynamic octave fuzzes so sound a bit like having 2nd voice/oscillator. The Tech21 Red Ripper is another such dynamic pedal but isn’t gated. (There’s a Chunk Brown Dog gated fuzz in the sale section at the moment which is another good choice.) Octaver so far I’ve held on to the Octabvre MKII (the Mini is also cool) which is the classic OC-2 type sound, MXR BOD and Emma Octo-Nøjs. The MXR has the best response I’ve played (the Red Witch octave pedals are as responsive - again there’s one on sale right now and an Octabvre II). Filter I’m finding my Manta is giving the most satisfying results at the moment. It’s not as phat or juicy sounding as my analogue filters but I’ve managed to create some nice presets which work well. My Wonderlove also gets some great sounds but takes a bit more work to dial it in. Some way to parallel blend the fuzz and octave yields great results as you can keep the octave clean and run both it and the dirt into the filter. I use a Boss LS-2 for this. The Cog T-65 or T-70 allow this with the bonus of an octave up. A quick and really good combination would be to get the Octo-Nøjs (which does octave down in parallel with fuzzy octave down and gated octave fuzz) and run that into the Manta. There’s a wealth of good sounds to be had from that combination and used you could get both for around £225 in total. The EHX Bass Microsynth is also worth a look. It’s more limited than the Manta but can do some stuff the Manta can’t. It has octave down, octave up, clean and square wave fuzz all running into a resonant filter. The cool thing about this is the envelope section which works by specifying a start and stop frequency and setting the rate at which the filter sweeps between them. You set the volume threshold at which the envelope is triggered. This means the envelope shape remains uniform regardless of your playing dynamics, which is how synths without velocity sensitivity (Minimoog, Odyssey) and key tracking would work. I find this most noticeable when retriggering fast notes - the Manta ends up staying subby and undefined as it won’t retrigger whereas the BMS will retrigger. Great for fast staccato lines.

So true. The second law is that something I’ve wanted for ages, rarely comes up and I spent loads on then comes up multiple times for sale at vastly reduced prices at the point I need to sell it.

I know what you mean. The phone is also not foot-controllable. Sadly MIDI Pad 2 doesn’t have a function to share pages created. (I have emailed them to request this functionality.) It’s a shame as I spent quite a bit of time creating one which allows instant access to patches 1-128 which involves tediously configuring each button manually to have the corresponding program number (sliders for choosing the parameters was a bit tricky). They should write some code to automate the most widely-used configurations or have some templates. Still, it works fine now for creating patches away from a PC. For live use, a foot controller will be needed. @dood has a couple for sale on the effects sale forum.

Do you have an iPhone or iPad? If so MIDI Pad 2 is a £3 app that you can use to send program messages. It works fine. Plug into the hub’s USB port and a camera connection kit into the iPhone. The hub allows you to store 128 presets in addition to the 2 hardware presets on the pedal. Really useful even if you only own the one pedal.

I got it working again. I don’t seem to be able to see the currently installed toneprint. It is still buggy as it crashed the first time I tried to save my changes to a template

I’ve asked via the comments in the YouTube video.

All day I’ve managed to open the app without a pedal attached. I attached a pedal and now it won’t open at all! Have tried uninstalling it and reinstalling to no avail.

In fairness, mine updates in the early hours so if it was released around 9am it wouldn’t get updated until after midnight. Does it show which toneprint is currently installed when booking up a pedal?

The dirt can only be used in combination with a filter. However you could open up the frequency to taste, turn down resonance and set envelope depth to zero in order to just use the dirt.

Cool! Definitely get a hub soon though! I wish I’d got one at the start as I overwrote a few good sounds I’d created. If you get one then I can share some cool presets I’ve made.

What’s that then? Did you get a Manta?

It wasn’t really tracking that was the problem, it was the noise gate that wasn’t great which caused bleed and oversensitivity. They fixed this and updated all the remaining old stock. The paint job was a bit iffy on the old version and they have switched suppliers for the new one. It’s much better.

John Lewis sell the Apple ones. Worth spending the extra to get the one which allows you to connect to the mains at the same time. £30. Often the 3rd party ones don’t work properly with midi so I wouldn’t try to economise in this case as you’ll end up spending more.

It’s here!

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This must’ve automatically updated overnight as I noticed a new icon on my home screen. Connection is via camera connection kit into usb. I’ve got to go to work now but might take a pedal with me to play with in my break.

If you get the Convertor that isn’t too bad, though the full prices are quite high. I bought the old version of the Squaver when it was discounted. What I’m unsure about in this demo with the Minitaur is whether he’s sending the envelope signal from the Squaver to the filter cutoff of the Minitaur. More interesting to me would be to simply send the pitch and gate signals from the Squaver to trigger the Minitaur’s own envelopes. I might get in touch to ask.

This is a better demo: @andybassdoyle

Monophonic synths often have much more in the way of timbral and modulation possibilities, partly due to the fact that you can stack up a bunch of oscillators on one note and it will sound great; if you stack up too many fat voices in poly it gets a bit overwhelming. Monophonic is great for lead and bass sounds. Polyphonic is more for textural or chordal stuff. Polysynths don’t always do bass as well as monosynths.

I just played a CS in a shop for an hour. It is 8 voice poly or mono which is cool. It’s a shame about how you feel about the Nord as it really sounds right up your street. From reading around, even the electro 4 has the sample synth module. There’s a used one on gumtree for £800. Edit - the electro 3 was the first one in this line to include the sample synth. You could probably pick up a 61 key version of that pretty cheaply. A 61 key 4D went for £571.

All correct. I’ve been aware of them for several months now and have had a lengthy email exchange with James Chick with a view to my buying one.

One of the best interfaces I’ve seen which combines presets with WYSIWYG is the Moog Little and Slim Phatty which has LED rings around the knobs which show where the current value is. Each of the four knobs has a few buttons which select which parameter is adjusted and the ring displays the value accordingly. Nord Lead 3 has a similar arrangement but it is one-knob-per-function.