bobbass4k

You could look at the Wooly Mammoth or Mastotron as bass friendly fuzz face type circuits, plenty of good layouts/project PCBs available for both. Good bass overdrive circuits tend to be bigger and more complex, as a rule fuzzes are the easiest and a good place to start. Are you building on stripboard or buying PCBs? What kind of pedals are you most interested in?

Interesting, the site says it's fundamentally a blower box, which itself is fundamentally a rat clone. Yeah the sonic maximizer is basically a 3-band filter, each band gets split and processed differently then blended back together. The extra gain control could be the gain of the preamp stage in the sonic maximizer part (which would normally be fixed) and maybe the volume is some sort of blend? Interesting idea, surprised they haven't pushed it more considering the current popularity of aggressively eq'd distortions (after so many years of the metal zone being a punchline...)

Adjustable crossovers adds a fair amount of complexity/physical size. Certainly not beyond a DIY designer but as bloke_zero has pointed, when there's a decent kit that covers everything you're after that's always going to be the easiest option.

Messy new setup for recording a new project, home use only hence the very tight spacing - intended for bass and guitar. Few brandeds creeping back in but still largely DIY

Someone mentioned the dimension-c earlier. If you're intrigued, TC do an almost perfect clone of it in their "how-is-this-making-a-profit" £30 odd quid range (3rd dimension). Pretty much a risk free gamble at that price I'd say.

Looks like a muff with an active 3-band EQ, should be interesting for bass and go beyond traditional muff territory.

I spent a lot of the time I worked at Farnell trying to convince them they needed to offer a prototype/small run service like that and was repeatedly rebuffed... Should have emailed my digikey contact...

Though "true" bit-crushing is digital you can do a decent impression of it with an analog circuit, though I actually don't know which came first, it could very well have been the digital. As martin said, there's only so much you can do to a soundwave from a physics perspective. We've hit the limit on actual unique effects, don't forget none of the are particularly new - everything now is about the boundaries of digital - combining the effects and controlling them in ways that weren't possible before. Look at something like the Rainbow Machine - it's fundamentally a delay and a pitch shifter, but the way they're combined and the controls you're given makes it sound completely unique.

In case you haven't discovered it, you can wedge the switch between mode 1 and mode 2 to run both in parallel and get another sound out of it. Obviously it's not designed for it, but it's a delightful upside of behringer using the cheapest switches possible.

Melissa Villasenor from SNL is an insanely good singing impressionist. The sketches may not be to everyone's taste here ("American rubbish!" I hear you cry already...) but it's hard to argue with her pipes -

It's been a while but I think i know what bit you mean (2:40ish?) - he's not shifting the drone note of the original riff, he's basically playing fifths, letting them ring and throwing in a few hammer ons to give the feel of the original riff shifting up, but in a way that he can actually play. Justin chancellor is a brilliantly creative bassist, a virtuoso he ain't. Many of his lines can sound intimidating, but tend to be based around one or two tricks and can sound hard because of the time sigs/rhythm tricks but they just need a bit of work. Lateralus, jambi and the grudge I remember as being fun ones to play.

Do you have a shot of the internals? Are you planning on replacing it yourself? It's likely just a sub-miniature switch, but you'll need to know the contact configuration and whether it's SMT or Through-Hole. These are the general idea - https://uk.farnell.com/w/c/switches-relays/switches/toggle-switches?product-range=2m-series

I only used EZ Drummer briefly but from what I remember of the tutorials they were really pushing using the VST interface, I seem to remember a slogan claiming that "you'll never need to use the piano roll again", which for me is not a selling point. I eventually settled on Superior Drummer 2 (also toontrack) which is exclusively focussed on the sounds. Like Douglas, I program parts in manually (keyboard/mouse) directly into the piano roll. This is just the most intuitive for me and lets me program very complex parts that I'd have no chance playing in on the midi controller. Like Douglas, I try to do eveything at DAW level and am very skeptical of VSTs that try to shackle you into them for basic functionallity. I'm not sure what you looked at before settling on EZDrummer but Addictive might be worth a look - it doesn't have the flexibility or sound library of Superior Drummer but it has loads of very useable presets that make it very easy to get going.

Newest build for recording some stuff with a few new DIY additions - Brief notes for the DIY ones - 1 - Schalltechnik pumpernickel - Compressor 2 - EQD Arpanoid clone - Arrpegiator 3 - EQD Life clone - Tweaked Rat with octave and boost 4 - Modded blueberry clone 5 - Moosapotamous Dirty Bird - Mad squelchy fuzz - like a prunes and custard but angrier and less useful 6 - VFE Triumvate - 3-band distortion 7 - Catalinbread SFT clone with mods - Cranked SVT sound 8 - SUNN Model T preamp clone 9 - DBA Space Ring clone with mods - Very angry ring modulator 10 - Frostwave funk-a-duck clone - Completely mad envelope filter 11 - mid-fi pitch pirate clone - Modded to switch between internal LFO and extermal CV 12 - Sequencer - Puts out sequenced CV for the pitch pirate and phaser 13 - Lovetone Doppelganger clone 14 - EQD Rainbow Machine clone 15 - DBA Echo Dream clone - Modded heavily so it actually works... 16 - Madbean Dreamtime - Unique multi-mode digital delay 17 - Reverb - Belton brick based very spacey reverb

Why has nobody asked about the picture of Tuvok? I wouldn't find it odd except that it seems to be positioned so you can lock eyes with him as you drum....

I'm far from an expert, though I've worked in 3 electronics companies buying heavily from China and the EU. China's and our trading relationship with the EU is apples and oranges. China/EU trade is facilitated by a colossal industry of brokers, middlemen and importers/exporters who deal with the bureaucracy. UK/rest of EU trade was much more direct, because it could be. Yes we've dealt with the rest of the world for years, but for the end consumer importing stuff from the rest of the world has been prohibitively expensive for all those years too. America, Australia, Japan etc. Places like thomann, gear4music and countless other businesses across all sectors were built around the assumption that this would never happen. For them, there is only damage control, and we as consumers are only ever going to have less than we did before. Also worth pointing out that yes, businesses trade with the rest of the world more than the EU but its 51.1% to 48.9% so we're still talking about basically half of the average companies business being affected.

Just under the wire (because I was hard at work, not because I forgot...) - a cover I've wanted to do for a long time and it has other destinations but I may as well confuse and annoy you all with it too. For me, the top tier in the steaming parfait of festering, toxic s**t that was 2020 was the return of Tim Smith (Cardiacs) to whatever plane of reality he came from. This is my anemic homage - Vocals, piano bit and other ideas by my girlfriend -- Elen McKeever Garay Wireless (Cardiacs)

Ahhh they´re CNC´d - I thought the small lettering looked very neat for an acid etch. What CNC setup are you using? It´s not something I´ve really considered before - but thinking about it it would make a lot of things easier and there seem t o be some cheapish diy options around.

That looks incredible - can i ask about your etching process? I've had mixed results with it, to paint the etch I usually mask off the empty space and spray paint the etched bits, then sand the whole thing with super fine paper - but I've found it difficult to get a deep enough etch that's also clean for that to work.

How dare you. It's also self-indulgent w***y jazz for hipsters. To be fair it probably has the same ratio of utter toss to good stuff as prog, but with less Rick Wakeman in a wizard's cloak. So I think we can all agree it has an edge.

Seen lightning bolt live three times in my life, each one louder than the last. Noise rock is about as useful a term as rock itself - it´s applied so liberally to bands that are so different to each other that it doesn´t hold much weight as a genre. Sonic youth, shellac, the jesus lizard, there´s far more digestable entries in the canon, and then something like the locust, which makes lighting bolt look like baby shark... Personally I´ve always thought of lightning bolt as a really really loud jazz band that get stuck in a 30 second time loop.

It´s important to understnd what a cab sim is - like baloney alludes to above, they´re basically just a really aggressive, specific EQ that emulates the response of the speaker cones. I have one (a DIY one) permanently in front of my interface. With straight clean tone, I can live without it, but it´s absolutely essential for using distortion (and other) pedals. Drive/Distortion pedals generate a lot of harsh high frequencies that the designers have assumed will be filtered or smoothed out by the amp/cab so will never sound as intended direct without a cab sim or aggressive EQíng. If you´re going to be mainly doing straight clean, I´d say a cab sim is optional, and like baloney says, there may be other (cheaper) ways to get the sound you´re after.

3 was maybe a little brighter to my ears than the other three, but all much of a muchness really. I quite liked 4 personally, not as a chorus sure, but as it´s own effect - like a phaser or dark, thick flanger without the usual hollowness and without much of an audible sweep. I´d quite like the answers too please.

Asymmetric clipping produces more odd harmonics, creating a slightly harsher, more dissonant tone. Symmetric will produce more even harmonics, not necceassirly smoother, but a more pleasent sound. In pratcice the difference can be kind of hard to notice when you´re doing hard clipping like here (diodes directly on the op-amp output). It´s more noticeable in soft clipping setups (in the feedback loop of the op-amp) like the tubescreamer.

Never a truer word spoken - I did a very rough estimate of how much I´ve spent building pedals over the years - it had 4 digits and the first was not 1...