I sold my soul.....

[Muadzin]

I sold my soul to the Devil and have gone digital.





Analog is dead and tubes are for suckers!

Seriously though, I just hate tapdancing and changing settings between and during songs. I want presets. And boy, did I get them. And scenes. And X & Y settings. Mother of Chrome, the possibilities are endless. It's full of stars!

As I come to terms with using this beast I keep on learning new stuff. Just when I think I figured it all out some new option pops up like a jack in a box. I've been busy now for weeks creating and tweaking my presets for my band. And even worse, I've not built a single pedal since I started to use this beast. In the past I built on average 4 pedals per month, and even though most of them did not end up on my pedal board, there was always a chance one of them might kick off an old favorite. And that slim chance was enough to keep on building. But now there's no chance, so why even bother...... I've got whole Tayda orders still sitting in their packages. Why even bother when I'm not going to use them? In which case why do I keep ordering them?

Which is sad because I really liked building stuff. I guess for now it's building virtual stuff that will have to do.

[Travis]

We'll make sure that you are banned quickly and painlessly

[Frank_NH]

I suppose it's inevitable as digital processors get more powerful.  Still, I've actually been going the other way lately.  I have a digitech RP1000, which is infinitely tweakable and has just about every effect, amp model, cab model, wah model, etc. under the sun. But...as I've been playing live gigs, I've become somewhat dissatisfied with my basic tone.  A simple analog pedal or two sounds much better in most cases, and much more natural and in line with my playing and song selections (mostly rock and roll, and alt country).

Having said that, the ease of use and flexibility of digital pedalboards can't be denied!  Enjoy.  

[Muadzin]

Travis wrote

We'll make sure that you are banned quickly and painlessly

You are too kind, good sir!

[Drey]

Started building pedals over 12 years ago. Had my "digital phase". Recently went back to building pedals. At the end of the day having both is the best of both worlds. There are some analog pedals that ain't available in any software or hardware digital processor

[rocket88]

Got to agree. Can never say doing something in music is wrong, but idk I just feel there's something lost with digital and modeling, sorta like using wireless instead of actual cables. I think it's because with digital everything is supposed to be perfect, and you loose the oddities you get with analog, which I mean in a good way. Plus, a lot of big acts do use both, like ZZTop. Billy Gibbons travels with a 5 draw pedal tower and uses a fractal for his amp.

[motterpaul]

Speaking of Tap dancing - building my first basic Looper pedal makes my largely Tagboard-based pedalboard a LOT more usable.

[Muadzin]

rocket88 wrote

Got to agree. Can never say doing something in music is wrong, but idk I just feel there's something lost with digital and modeling, sorta like using wireless instead of actual cables. I think it's because with digital everything is supposed to be perfect, and you loose the oddities you get with analog, which I mean in a good way. Plus, a lot of big acts do use both, like ZZTop. Billy Gibbons travels with a 5 draw pedal tower and uses a fractal for his amp.

If I had Billy Gibbons' guitar tech and road crew I wouldn't be using just the Axe, I would be using a big ass 19" rack, two of everything, Twin Towers of Sonic Doom. With nice tube power amps and a wall of Marshall cabs. And at least 2 Axe FX units in each rack. The Edge has like 8 of them in his racks these days. Maybe even 12 depending on what some roadie said.

Unfortunately I don't have a guitar tech and road crew to haul my stuff around.  In which case practicality has to the front seat. Consistency and reliability are big qualities in their own right and I tried using a rack drawer full of dirt pedals. I couldn't get it to work right at first, I think that now I could. But then again, it added 10 kilos to the rack, and I live in a building three stories high with no elevator, so not going to happen. It's heavy enough as it is.

motterpaul wrote

Speaking of Tap dancing - building my first basic Looper pedal makes my largely Tagboard-based pedalboard a LOT more usable.

I've built many loopers over the years. A/B switchers, dual A/B switchers, very complicated loopers, with buffers and preamps,relay switching, loops with loops, order reversal loops:


With stereo switching:


I did a lot with those. I had great fun designing and building them. Maybe I liked building loopers even more then I did building pedals as I am not building someone else's layout but creating my own thing. They really helped me keep my huge pedalboard, no small thanks to Tagboard , manageable. But they didn't give me presets....

Still, if anyone ever desires help with a custom looper project, feel free to ask. There's probably no routing scheme insane enough that will surprise me.

[Pavlos]

now those loopers look pretty useful, and I'm would think that layouts for 2, 3 , 4 way versions would be a welcome addition to the site, or if it's possible, perhaps a basic layout that you can just repeat a section to get more loops?

not sure you've sold your soul though Muadzin.......but you may well have been tempted by the dark side, be strong, fight the urge, you can do it, hold onto that last glow of warm hope from your soldering iron, the pedals will stray true and strong even through the darkest of digital nights!

errr.....pt2399 builds.....oops, they're digital too

In the meantime I hope you have many a satisfying hour with your shiney new spaceship

[Travis]

Pavlos wrote

now those loopers look pretty useful, and I'm would think that layouts for 2, 3 , 4 way versions would be a welcome addition to the site, or if it's possible, perhaps a basic layout that you can just repeat a section to get more loops?

not sure you've sold your soul though Muadzin.......but you may well have been tempted by the dark side, be strong, fight the urge, you can do it, hold onto that last glow of warm hope from your soldering iron, the pedals will stray true and strong even through the darkest of digital nights!

errr.....pt2399 builds.....oops, they're digital too

In the meantime I hope you have many a satisfying hour with your shiney new spaceship

http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.com/2012/07/true-bypass-looper-5-loops.html?m=0

[Pavlos]

Thanks Travis, must have missed that one.......now how foolish do I feel lol

thinking a little deeper on that though I expect that to switch only a single loop on at a time while automatically switching off any others would be significantly more complex and  possibly involve using relays?

[Pavlos]

and another of my mad ideas......how about using dip switches to select which loops are engaed by each of the footswitches.........or is that just insane

[Travis]

Not foolish at all. There are nearly 1,000 layouts on the main site, the only reason I knew it was there was because I've been following this site since the turret days and I remember that Mark posted this looper layout.

Regarding the dip switches, that's a neat idea, but I'm a little wary of such complicated signal routing for the bypass signal. Seems like an invitation for noise or tone suck issues, but I could be absolutely wrong there

[Pavlos]

I was half joking about feeling foolish :o) though to be fair I did completely miss that in the types of effects box on the right......plain as day......... is......yep you've guessed it.......L...O...O...P...E...R......and to think I ony had an eye test last week!

I had the same thought about the dip switches possibly adding unneccesarry complexity/noise/tone issues even in a fairly compact enclosure. Perhaps instead of a long and narrow box, would something like 1590BB be better for keeping the internal wiring shorter? enough space to have up to 4 switches on top and accomodate the jacks along the edges?

[motterpaul]

Cool on all the various Loopers, I will keep it in mind. It REALLY does make everything more manageable.

Also - you can always add the switchable buffer to the looper, just in case you need it.

[Sensei Tim]

Congrats on making the leap!

I too have been debating making the jump, but I've been thinking more about a powered kemper than an axefx for the exact reason you like the axe - seemingly endless tweak ability.

I want knobs to turn to change parameter, not having to go 3 menu layers in and then use up/down buttons to get to the parameter I want to adjust.

That being said, how do you find the amp emulation?  How amp like are they?

[Muadzin]

Personally I haven't bothered to learn how to use the Axe's external controls. I didn't on my Line6 gear either. Why bother when there's a good software editor and I too hate scrolling through menus? Which in the case of Line6 was very good intuitively. And Axe-Edit shared enough similarities to allow me to change over. For ease of use on the road/on stage I've added a USB connector on a front panel that has all my connections up front. Because no one should have to fumble in the dark in the back of a rack on a stage.

I fairly happy with the amp emulations and its really cool to hear what a difference cab simulations makes when you disengage it or not. But I'm probably not the best person to ask as I ditched my amps long ago. On my old pedalboard my sound was dirt and modulation pedals into an AMT preamp pedal, then sending that signal into stereo pitch shifting and delay pedals and then into a Marshall 8008 poweramp. And so far my goal has been to recreate the sounds from my old pedal board. Which was pedals into a Fender Twin, with dirt pedals adding either a high gain 80s Marshall sound, or fuzzy goodness. I'm happy with that now. A modded JCM800 sim boosted by a TS808 model really gives me that Marshally goodness.

There's a guy who did a youtube amp sim shoutout between the Line6 Helix and the Fractal AX-8, the Axe-FX's smaller floorboard brother. Overall he found the models to be fairly similar, although the ones on the Helix tended to be a bit brighter. Which might be because on the Fractal you have input gain, master volume and mixer volume. And while in amp sim country you can turn on the master volume at full blast without blood starting to drip from your ears, your tone tends to darken somewhat, just like on real amps. Which is why you also have mixer volume, to compensate for that.

[Sensei Tim]

Was that ola englund who did that demo?

While I think h is an amazing audio engineer, I always take his videos with a grain of salt. If you've seen his amp demos, he can make a cheap orange 1x8 combo sound as massive as a room full of mesas and 4x12s

Speaking of axe edit, can you edit and change stuff in real time with it or do you have to upload your patch to the axefx to test it?

[Muadzin]

No, Mitch Baker.

As for Axe Edit, you edit in real time. I often have some phrase played into a looper and its really cool to hear it change as you click on stuff.

[Sensei Tim]

you're making it more difficult to not go digital ;)

btw,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6MCzZGbIpE