Quatschmacher

With my (sadly departed) Sterling the ON didn’t respond very well at all - I had tracking problems galore. It works so much better on a P bass. Run this before the filter, better on a low pass one (the MXR is band pass). Even better, a filter with an FX loop so that your input dynamics are fully preserved. The Wonderlove does this really well. (The EHX Q-Tron+ has a loop too as does the WMD Protostar but the Wonderlove is the only one of these that allows you to use the contents of the loop without having to have the filter switched on.) Running it into the filter is functioning like subtractive synthesis in that the filter will remove the higher frequencies the more you turn the cutoff down.

Told you so. Get it running through an envelope-controlled filter for some real fun and kill the dry signal completely for synthy goodness. Sounds great on really low-gain settings. Tracking is better on a neck pickup. The best I got was on a Jazz bass with a rotosound steels on it. I prefer the sound using flats though as it takes the edge off the really high sizzle.

I heard one with a Barefaced 1x15 with a passive jazz on a gig and it sounded fantastic; fat and well-articulated.

The Protostar is a bust. The LFO has no gate and so is audible in the background. Also with the resonance over halfway and the cutoff high there’s an intrusive amount of hiss. Furthermore, the knobs are small but really sensitive so it’s really tricky to dial in and would be difficult to replicate similar settings between sessions. That being said, it does sound pretty damn cool. There’s a lot of scope for sound shaping. Ultimately though it’s a bit disappointing and it’s going back tomorrow and I’ll be £329 better off!

Actually, a third footswitch which toggles the dry on and off would be a possible alternative. Oh, and top-mounted sockets would be welcome.

It’s a great pedal. In fact I’ve just spent the last two hours playing mine. I’m sure you’ll love it. The gated fuzz in the Nøjs side is brilliant. (The only thing I’d like to see improved is the addition of separate dry knobs for each side of the pedal; there’s just one and it mixes the dry into both sides of the pedal. It means you can’t switch between a sound with dry and a sound without dry using the foot switches.) The Octabvre Mini is also great but a different kind of vibe (more mids) and is well worth getting too.

I’m not sure there is. I think it mainly stems from the “1” in the title; it implies a future version.

True. Though you could set the above up on the same toggle switch position with your preset A on the green light and your preset B on the red light so that holding down the pedal’s footswitch would switch between them. And if you’d set them up in parallel (on separate output jacks) you could use the LS-2 to flick between them. Furthermore, if you set up the LS-2 in A+B mix mode and feed one output of the Aftershock to the instrument input of the LS-2 and feed the other output of the Aftershock into either A or B return of the LS-2, then you can toggle between both drives running in parallel or just one drive.

Do you mean series (stacked) or parallel? If in parallel then both one drive or the other or both in parallel are possible options (especially if using an LS-2) as you can switch between A and B or have A+B Mix. If you mean stacked in series then you could have one of the six toggle/mode combination slots assigned to stack 2 drives and then program another slot to have those same two drives separated (either on separate jack outputs or via the same output but switchable). There’s not much this thing can’t do.

No, I believe you can only use it to switch between the left and right channel within one of the six toggle/mode combinations (or to turn stacking on and off as you suggested). The overwhelming nature of the options is what led me to sell mine. I’d be happier with the OFD I think or with a single (gated) distortion pedal.

I asked the inventor if he might be able to come up with a similar product to go inside a digital piano so that one feels the vibrations of the notes through the keybed, which would take things a step closer to the feel of an acoustic instrument. He took notice of my suggestion.

I believe @Al Krow is.

Protostar arriving tomorrow! I’ll let you all know how I get on. I’ve been waiting five months for this to be in stock.

Boss LS-2 will do this. Or Source Audio’s momentary toggle switch. I used the former.

Ah, I see. I don’t need that much of an excuse to come to NYC as it’s somewhere I’d really like to visit. 😀 Here are a couple of nice Rendez Vous settings I found (played with a passive P bass):

A couple on there that I still need to try (Meatball and Xerograph). I’d almost forgotten how big the Rendez Vous is. I much prefer this livery than the plain blue on the one I rented. The Great Divide 2 is cool too. @WaveyDavey, if you’re anywhere near Sheffield, is there any chance I might be able to try the Xerograph?