MrDinsdale

NAM is essentially a virtual snapshot of a piece of gear, could be an amp or a pedal that can’t be created and shared by users. It can’t do modulation, time based effects etc right now, it’s mostly just preamps and drives etc. They’re typically very realistic in how they react and allow you to share gear captures of gear that might be hard to obtain. Its just a snapshot of the gear with a specific set of controls though, the block has some gain, eq, and volume controls but they’re not necessarily going to respond the same as the actual gear would so you really have to create multiple captures of the gear with different settings. They’re well worth experimenting with, in my experience a good capture can sound excellent. Particularly when you want to experiment with stuff that’s a bit off the beaten track.

A quick audio clip, I realised after that the battery in my bass was pretty low and breaking up a little.

Direct level at 12 and +1oct at 1ish. I’ve actually got it set to poly and the other knobs all the way down.

Today’s experiment with zero practical use but a ton of fun at home: I’ve wired up the OC5 so the Direct Output goes to the Dirtfixer Input and the Output goes to the Longsword > Model FeT and back into the Dirtfixer return. This lets me blend in some +1 octave with a tone of distortion with my normal bass tone. Sounds filthy!!! Disabling the Dirtfixer also bypasses the OC5. As fun as it is I think I’d rather have my normal drive tone.

I know I keep banging on about it but if you’re not finding the breakup to your liking you could set up the gain/output like you have with the expression pedal but assign to input level instead. I found it difficult to get a subtle breakup when digging in with out making the tone too dirty sometimes so that would give you a little more dynamic control over it. Because it’s tied to device input you don’t need to worry too much about compressor placement either.

Don’t ruin this for me. The way I see it this is just getting some fundamentals in, foot in the door and that.

PS some of this is very aspirational stuff considering my current understanding but would love to learn this stuff. TBF if software development continues the trend of shifting to offshoring work and more reliance on AI producing spaghetti code it wouldn’t hurt to have some foundational understanding of a more practical trade 🫠

Yeah it was this that got my attention: https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/harmonic-percolator-with-some-mods.22248/ I’d really love to take some of these circuits and simplify them, maybe play around with switching a 3-band eq for a tilt style or a Baxandall tone stack etc like on the EAE Dagger.

The more I’ve been digging around and I think I’m gonna build the Euna kit as a warm up. I decided I do wanna get a DIY breadboard and a bunch of components I need to try out a few designs. There’s a Harmonic Percolator someone shared which I’d like to play around with. Maybe make a few tweaks here and there and learn as I go. I really wanna learn more about what I’m building and I’m not gonna get that just from putting together kits. Might even make some use out of the videos I watched on KiCad when I was looking at doing my own split mech keyboard layout.

Yeah they’re terrible. It’s all based on a lot of legacy tech too.

I’ve got an EAE Model FeT and Dagger but I’d still love to build them 🤣 That’s a very handy list, there’s a bunch there which sound really tempting!

So far these are the 3 that stand out as potential builds that would be super handy for me. The Euna is a definite. I’d probably grab one more while I’m there. The Compressor is tempting because it looks pretty easy and my Accountant is ace but noisy. The Muzzle noise gate looks a little more faffy but a noise gate would be extremely handy for me, particularly with the sidechain option.

Oooo nice! Yeah I might hit you up when I’ve got something together!

Nice! Where you based?

I’ve always wanted to try Airbrushing, I’ve had a book on it for about 20 years 🤣 Maybe this would be a good opportunity to grab one.

@LukeFRC What stamps do you use?

Looks great! At some point it would be cool to have a play with acid etching although I’d need to find somewhere away from my 5yo 🤣

Excited to build some. At least it should be less faffy than the surface mount DIY mech keyboards I’ve done. Dunno what I’ll do to finish it assuming it works.

Ooo good catch, well I think I’ll be popping an order for Musikding. Sadly they’re out of TS50b sets.

A TS50b is high on my want list too, maybe I can treat myself to a couple of fun projects.

Good shout, I was intending to grab it from Five Cat Pedals but that might be a better option. I’m not planning on churning out pedals, I’d quite fancied grabbing a breadboard and playing around with building some circuits to try, maybe experiment with different options. Maybe grab one of those Coppersound DIY boards to play with.

Fancy building my first pedal, thinking of a 29pedals Euna clone. It’s a very expensive pedal I keep eying up so this would be a cool way to stop me splashing out a load of money while having a fun project to help me avoid getting better at playing. Just wondering where people source components?

Yeah I’m still not sure how I feel about stuff like that. Doesn’t bother me as much for bigger gear manufacturers, certainly not when the gear that’s being modelled is out of production. Even products that are wildly out of the budget for most people to contemplate like the Nobel where it’s unlikely to impact sales. Captures don’t bother me much either, I’ve bought gear based on using captures that otherwise I would’ve been waaaaay less likely to splash out on. Large businesses modelling gear made by smaller boutique builders feels pretty unethical to me.

Yeah the input levels are more use for side chaining so like the noise gate example you can adjust the threshold relative to the device input rather than the noise gate block input level. Super handy for higher gain patches. It’s really fun for modulation though so when you dig in hard you can have parameters react differently. I set up some fun tape delays where digging in harder past a certain level would give more Wow and flutter etc the harder you played so the effects are a little more dynamic.

I can’t find any videos on it but one cool effect was using the Slicer effect but using an assign with the Internal Pedal set to a sine wave to control the “Pattern” parameter which results in a random sounding glitchy stutter. Great for building lofi patches. There’s some great examples of the kind of weird effects you can create here: