MOD Device (Dwarf/Duo/Duo X) owners' club - Tips, Ideas & Patches

[MrDinsdale]

Interested to know how you get on @Woodinblack

 

I was thinking of trying to pick up another Boss GT core but the mod looks like a really cool option. The main thing that puts me off it is the single FX loop, i have a few other drives and preamps I'd like to incorporate and FX loops make it way easier. 

[Woodinblack]

ok, so routing round in my spare PSU section I found a netgear 12V psu, and used that one instead. Its a lot quieter, and the buzz has gone away. I did find the 'get rid of ground buzz' setting did get rid of some of the buzz too, so it is now pretty well buzz free - its a little noisier than no effect, I don't know what that would be as a live thing (and also it is in my computer room which has a lot of noise sources). 

 

Playing around with just the effects that are set up as standard is actually pretty inspiring, they go from useful to completely unusable but interesting, very impressed with the quality and I haven't really done anything with it yet. I guess the best option is to take it to practice this week and see what it brings to the party.

Once I got used to the workflow of it, I found it surprisingly easy to navigate with only 3 buttons, with its pedalboards and snapshots - I know the HXFX has that but honestly i have never used it in that way. 

[Woodinblack]

And even odder - left it tonight, loads of holiday prep to do, animals to sort out. Now I have got back to it and as my wife has gone to bed I brought it downstairs. Plugged it into my spark and my wireless to the input. Totally dead silent. No noise whatsoever. I expected more as there is a wireless dongle hanging out of the input, nada.

 

 

[Woodinblack]

At the risk of sounding like I am having a conversation with myself here, I finally got down to actually using it last night.

Having been on the edge of whether I was going to send it back or not (I haven't even taken the plastic screen cover off yet, which is unheard of), I thought it needed a chance for the reasons I bought it.

 

So here is one of the issues that made me think of getting it, the two in two out thing.

I play, sing and keyboard Brick in the wall in our set. In the middle of the solo, because the rest of the song drops out I use footpedals to play chords while the guitarist solos, otherwise it sounds dead. I used to run from the footpedals up to my iPad, which ran M1, and then the iPad through audio socket to the mixer. Problem wiht this is that I don't like leaving the footpedals plugged in as they wear the iPad battery out a lot on a long set, but unplugging them and plugging them in sometimes means they are not picked up.

So I went to bluetooth midi, with a yamaha midi thing, but for reasons best known to yahama, when you first connect that, the iPad doesn't see it as a midi device until you rename it. obviously if the power goes off you have to rename it again. Also hit and miss. Also the wireless midi comes from a 9->5 adapter that it plugs into then to the keyboard.

 

So how about the mod dwarf doing synth?

 

Fired it up, new patch, plenty of synths but no organ.. go to the mod store, type organ in the search, there are quite a few, pick a basic GM player, sounds basically ok, but no leslie. Look for leslie speakers, but nothing there, back to the store, there are several, a few paid, a few free, got two of the free ones, start a/b ing them back to back. One is very basic, the other - I think the guy must have done his PhD on leslie speaker dynamics, speeds, acceleration, deceleration, sound bleed, filter type etc. Use that, got a good sound, but add some chorus at the end, why not. Add the fast / slow speed to one of the footswitch and the fast speed rate to one of the knobs.

Still something missing so I add another synth, this one has a violin setting, just as a fill, put that through the chorus, but not through the leslie, and turn it down in the mix (should have used a mixer there). Put the volume of that on the other knob as its much louder than the organ anyway.

Keys sound fine, so now bass - don't need anything much for this so just a straight signal with a little bit of dirt on the high frequencies, so put in a crossover, and route the HF through the distortion, perfect, put the switch of that on the other footswitch, gig that at the weekend.

Look up, oops, should have gone to bed a while back, its a school night!

 

I have an HXFX, and yes, the general effects sound good, and the routing is fine, probably nothing you couldn't do (apart from the synths, you can't do that) without a workaround, and probably much easier to set up without plugging it into a computer on the fly, but nothing like the fun of setting this up with a screen.

 

I must remember when I get back downstairs to remove the plastic from the screen!

 

 

[SamIAm]

The ability to run a synth on the Dwarf was a major plus point for me.

Glad to see you are having fun ... more to come!

S'manth x

[Woodinblack]

How do you currently use your MVave switches with it?

[SamIAm]

4 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

How do you currently use your MVave switches with it?

I've got my MVave configured in custom control mode, where each footswitch sends a specific CC with alternating 0/127 value.  I use 1,2,3 to toggle on/off effects (Octave/Fuzz/Reverb) and 4 to start/stop the MIDI player.  I've not found a way to use the MVave mode that allows for bank switching to drive my Dwarf (This is why I'm building my own). MY MVave is connected to the Dwarf via a USB cable.

This is the pedalboard I'm tinkering with at present.

 

S'manth x

 

Edited April 26, 2023 by Smanth

[tauzero]

2 hours ago, Smanth said:

The ability to run a synth on the Dwarf was a major plus point for me.

Glad to see you are having fun ... more to come!

S'manth x

 

Synth was a plus for me too, as I can play either a little bit of keys or something with a 12-step (single notes with something like a Taurus or chords on strings or organ). I'm just starting with experimenting with it.

[Woodinblack]

40 minutes ago, Smanth said:

I've got my MVave configured in custom control mode, where each footswitch sends a specific CC with alternating 0/127 value.  I use 1,2,3 to toggle on/off effects and 4 to start/stop the MIDI player.  I've not found a way to use the MVave mode that allows for bank switching to drive my Dwarf (This is why I'm building my own). MY MVave is connected to the Dwarf via a USB cable.

 

By switch bank, do you mean changing pedalboard? Still not familiar with all the terminology on these things.

 

I wouldn't want to change pedalboard mid song as there is so much of a delay doing it, but happy to do it between songs.

 

40 minutes ago, Smanth said:

 

This is the pedalboard I'm tinkering with at present.

 

Looks good - I need another pedalboard with samples, as I have a digitech loopman on my board for one sample, and obviously I can drop that now with this, so I am rapidly losing cables, which was what I wanted to do!

 

6 minutes ago, tauzero said:

Synth was a plus for me too, as I can play either a little bit of keys or something with a 12-step (single notes with something like a Taurus or chords on strings or organ)

 

Thats where I am. Next samples, then I can do pedalboards for the chapman stick and the double bass!

[SamIAm]

1 hour ago, Woodinblack said:

By switch bank, do you mean changing pedalboard? Still not familiar with all the terminology on these things.

 

By "bank" I mean the set of values that will be sent by buttons.

For example, with the MVave setup to use Program Change A, it starts up in Bank (They may use the phrase group) 1.

Button 1 will send a PC 0 message, Button 2->PC 1, and so on.

If you depress Button 3&4 simulatneously, the MVave will page up a bank/group, so that Button 1 will send  PC 4, Button 2->PC 5, and so on.

Pressing Buttons 1&2 simulataneously will go down a bank/group. There are multiple banks/groups so by paging up and down one can achieve many more than 4 different MIDI messages.

Sadly however, it does not appear that this can be used to send CC messages, which is what I gather the Dwarf wants to activate/deactivate plugins, etc.  The MVave mode I use only lets one configure for the four buttons, there seems to be no ability to use the banks/group concept.

There is a nifty writeup thread over on the MOD forum.

 

S'manth x 

[Woodinblack]

ok, that makes sense, I thought you meant bank on the dwarf!

[Woodinblack]

As I had previously asked how much power a mod dwarf took, and how the first power supply I found in my box that was 12V was 5A, i thought I would check today how much it took.

Answer.. just a shade over 300mA. 200 at startup, going to the maximum I made it take which was with all of the lights on, midi working, two inputs, pedalboard with everything on it which peaked at 320ma.

 

Was expecting a bit more than that, as it is marked as 2A, the HXFX is also marked as 2A and that comes in just over 1.1A.

[Woodinblack]

So first gig with the mod dwarf yesterday. I put it on my pedalboard in the space taken by the Helix HXFX. I had a new pedalboard on order from thomann, backordered because they are waiting for the power supplies, and I need to cancel it - i need a smaller board not a bigger one! it takes the function of all my other pedals.

Sounded great, using mostly the stock SVT patch, although as i have dedicated output 2 to keyboards, I messed up and used a stero patch in one song that was way too loud - Have to ensure either to mute the output when not using keys, or more generally make sure the patches are mono.

 

Navigation isn't as smooth as the helix, mostly due to the number of buttons (same reason I never got a Helix stomp) so will need some external footpedal to be able to switch effects on and off - unless I can just use the 12 step somehow. 

Switching between patches is a bit cumbersome during an actual gig, unless you know what is coming up, I often dont.

So I will need a general patch, a patch for when I am using keys, and a patch with a lot of different switchable effects.

 

Still great fun and it sounded really good.

[SamIAm]

@Woodinblack pix of your setup (or it doesn't exist ... according to BC lore) 🤣

Glad it went well!

S'manth x

[Woodinblack]

Well, the actual pedalboard looks really sad - it has an audio effect pedal, the dwarf, a large gap and a aby switch (used to be wireless / wired, and below the pedalboard and page turner. More spare gaps than anything!

 

The actual setup in the dwarf not that exciting at the moment, I need to spend time with it, but not got any time at the moment. I took the SVT patch that is default, and added a crossover before the octaver, so it doesn't really kick in until the octave below is in normal bass range anyway (or things get messy). 

The thing I had the problem with at practice was too many pedalboards - I see there are banks - they are not explained at all in the manual and I don't see in the Web UI how to make new banks. I suppose I can just delete all the patches already existing, and maybe back them up, but in practice I tried paging between all the banks from the top to the bottom, and the dwarf locked up, just flashing the purple lights at me. I settled for naming my patches with 1, 2, 3 etc in front of them for easy access. that worked, but not ideal at the moment.

 

I guess I should just ask on the dwarf thread.

 

My current other issue is that when you assign a knob in the UI to a knob on the panel, you can't seem to be able to name it, so when playing around, I had assigned several knobs to several controls, and I had a panel labeled 'Volume' 'Volume' 'Volume' - which is remarkably unhelpful!

 

[tauzero]

1 hour ago, Woodinblack said:

My current other issue is that when you assign a knob in the UI to a knob on the panel, you can't seem to be able to name it, so when playing around, I had assigned several knobs to several controls, and I had a panel labeled 'Volume' 'Volume' 'Volume' - which is remarkably unhelpful!

 

Click on "Advanced", the sole purpose of which appears to be to allow you to rename the function.

[tauzero]

1 hour ago, Woodinblack said:

The thing I had the problem with at practice was too many pedalboards - I see there are banks - they are not explained at all in the manual and I don't see in the Web UI how to make new banks. I suppose I can just delete all the patches already existing, and maybe back them up, but in practice I tried paging between all the banks from the top to the bottom, and the dwarf locked up, just flashing the purple lights at me. I settled for naming my patches with 1, 2, 3 etc in front of them for easy access. that worked, but not ideal at the moment.

 

I haven't experimented with this yet, but bottom left of the Web UI is the function selection, and "Banks" is the middle one of the five functions. You can add a bank and drag pedalboards into it.

[SamIAm]

Just now, tauzero said:

 

I haven't experimented with this yet, but bottom left of the Web UI is the function selection, and "Banks" is the middle one of the five functions. You can add a bank and drag pedalboards into it.

I think then in Navigation mode (The one wherre you can select pedalboards/snapshots)  on the Dwarf, a button allows you to select a bank which then changes the set of Pedalboards that appear in the list ... I think!

S'manth x

[Woodinblack]

Yeh - how dumb am I, within a few minutes of actually looking I solved both of those issues. As you say, the advanced does the label (never clicked on that) and the banks are on their own section (I was looking in pedalboards).

I am not actually sure if I still want to keep all those pedalboards, even if I have got banks, but I dont' want to lose them either.

 

This is the great advantage of posting here, only 2 people know I am an idiot here, whereas in the mod forum everyone would!

 

[SamIAm]

Pedalboards tend to take a non trivial time to load, I think it is because for each plugin the MOD ecosystem creates a new Jack client ... snapshots load much quicker.  This has led me to using fewer pedalboards, which have more plugins ... then changing the on/off status (or even routing) using snapshots.

S'manth x

[SamIAm]

21 minutes ago, Woodinblack said:

This is the great advantage of posting here, only 2 people know I am an idiot here, whereas in the mod forum everyone would!

 

I'm sure there are at least four of us here who have a MOD device, I've seen @andybassdoyle (Hiya Andy 👋) posting over on the MOD forum.

S'manth x

[Woodinblack]

ok, so 3 people who know I am an idiot

 

Been fiddling around with stuff, getting the hang of it. Very important to get the levels right, I switched patch on the gig yesterday and almost deafened everyone with the bass (mind you, it was deafening, but it sounded great!)

 

Have spent the evening looking at the footswitch specs. Think I will probably go the easy route and just make a control chain interface. That way all the asignment can be done in the Web UI, so there isn't anything else to do.

[SamIAm]

54 minutes ago, Woodinblack said:

Have spent the evening looking at the footswitch specs. Think I will probably go the easy route and just make a control chain interface. That way all the asignment can be done in the Web UI, so there isn't anything else to do.

I'm interested to see what you find.  I think that CC devices can get info out of the Dwarf that a MIDI pedal cannot, which could be handy.

 

Both CC and MIDI assignments are done in the Web GUI.  I'm unclear as to how one would configure the CC device itself, for example ... can a CC button be setup to do different things for single/double/long taps?

 

One (annoying!) constraint of MIDI on the Dwarf is that a particular MIDI message seems to be only assignable to a single plugin parameter, thus to drive different plugins a controller button needs to be able to send multiple MIDI messages (I have pondered writing a plugin that would recognise a particular MIDI message and then send out one or more, sorta like a MIDI multiplier/macro/translator thing ... but I've yet to get my head around LV2 development!), I wonder if CC is more flexible.

S'manth x

 

Edited April 30, 2023 by Smanth

[Woodinblack]

Basically, from my brief reading, on connecting the CC device (footpedal or whatever) introduces itself to the dwarf, describing its features, along the line of  'Hi, I am an external device called "Footpedal from hell", I have 12 switches, 8 knobs, and 3 expressions, here are the parameters of my controls" and sends a list saying for each control what its limits are, if it is a button it is latching or momentary etc.

Then in the webUI setup, you can assign whatever parameters to those knobs, so when you load that patch, the dwarf will send a list of parameters to the pedal such as 'Switch 1 is called Drive and it is off, switch two is called octave- and it is on' etc.

Makes for quite a flexible system because obviously just because you have say, 4 buttons, you don't have to say you have 4, you can say you have 8 if you have ways to send 8 virtual buttons to the system, so if you have 5 buttons, and one switches between 4 banks, you can say you have 16.

 

The downside of it at the moment is that you can just control the mod dwarf this way, but if at sometime you get something else, you can just change the code.

[MrDinsdale]

Just wondering if anyone is using the Dwarf alongside other analog pedals?

 

I have some pedals, 2x preamps and 2x drives that I have no intention of removing. Stuff like the GT1000core and Stomp definitely have an advantage over this in the sense that they have 2 fx loops which give you way more options for wiring them up. Would be curious to see how people have wired it up.