placing and re-placing effects mid-performance

[angelo]

i know this has been talked to death but...
here is a typical effects set-up for three songs. How the heck am I supposed to do this live? With an expensive switcher (switchblade)!! Why should a signal router/switch be so expensive and rare? I know there are a million guitarrists who have this same problem as me. Just go to guitargeek.com to see all of the effects-crazy punks.
Also, being able to activate 3 effects at a time should be an inexpensive venture...but it is not.

Song 1
compression>preamp>delay>LFOfilter>reverb>poweramp
song 2
compression>LFOfilter>preamp>delay>reverb>poweramp
song 3
preamp>compression>preamp>delay>filter>reverb>poweramp

[R.G.]

Angelo, there is not a good, inexpensive commercial solution. But go take a look at the effects switching articles at GEO - http://www.geofex.com - espcially the "Programmable Footswitch System".

There is actually a way open for you to do this now, but it's not all that cheap. Use two or three true bypass boxes to switch in/out chains of several pedals that do the rearrangement. It requires you to have multiple copies of individual effects, but it makes it possible.

... um... maybe there will be a suitable solution in the near future...

[Mark Hammer]

Using low-level non-digital technology, here is the simplest possible solution to your dilemma.

Wire yourself up a "master box", with an in, an out, and send/return jacks for every pedal you expect to use. Each of those send and return jacks now gets wired up to a rotary switch as pedal 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. The rotary switches are 2-pole, 6-position, types. These are now assigned to imaginary "stations". Each station can select which pair of send/return jacks it will use. Because the pedals themselves are not committed to any particular serial position, they can be re-ordered by the rotary switches.

This is entirely passive (unless you need unique indicator LEDs or something like that), and can actually be built with parts from Radio Shack. It comes with the following caveats, though:

1) This is not like your old push-button car radio where picking one station immediately excludes others. So, until you've finished telling all the stations what they will be in terms of pedals, it is entirely possible for the same pedal to be selected at more than one station. This means that....

2) You will absolutely need to have a master bypass switch that links the master input and output jacks directly, so that you can do all your fiddling with rotary switches "off-line", thereby not having to listen to whatever popping and whining may occur as a pedal momentarily finds itself trying to be in two places at once.

3) Since the sugegsted unit is only for re-ordering and not for enabling individual pedals, you will want to have it set up so that the pedals are in front and the control box behind. This way you can use the control box to substitute for re-patching, but still use the individual pedal bypass switches.

[Ray Ivers]

Angelo,

If you can live with a fixed delay>reverb>poweramp setup (I know I could; using both delay and reverb I seriously doubt placing the filter either before or after the delay will make a song-ruining difference, but YMMV) - and assuming song #3's initial preamp listing is a typo, meaning the compressor is always the first effect in line - all you'd have to do is switch the filter in front of the preamp for song #2. Without knowing what kind of preamp and FX we're talking about I can't really be any more specific than that, but perhaps it will help anyway - it's certainly an easier switching problem to solve (and if song #2 is a clean guitar tone, filter placement really won't matter much if at all IMO).

Ray

[Ben N]

Mmmmm, Mark, been looking at those old Anderton GP columns again? That was a three-part series, IIRC--around 1981, right?

[Mark Hammer]

Some of the folks I see in the commuter bus sit reading their Bibles, some reading their Korans, and some reading their Dean Koontz. Me, I read my binders of old articles and schems.

[David Schwab]

Anderton wrote up some great stuff. I had the entire Device newsletter back then. Unfortunately it was ruined in a flood.

I just picked up an old copy of Home Recording for Musicians... the one that has projects to build.

Now I'm trying to find the first version of EPFM... He changed some of the projects in the second one...i.e., added the revised version of the Tube Sound Fuzz (the one without the driver op amp).

Boy, those were fun times!

I can often be found reading schematics and pickup patents on the train... My last read was Making An Archtop Guitar by Bob Benedetto.

[Mark Hammer]

If you're missing DEVICE, then go here: http://hammer.ampage.org

Scroll down to around page 10 or so and you will find what you seek. You may see some familiar names in there, too!

[David Schwab]

If you're missing DEVICE, then go here: http://hammer.ampage.org

Scroll down to around page 10 or so and you will find what you seek. You may see some familiar names in there, too!

Wow Mark... you just made my week! I was actually searching the 'net for this a few weeks ago! Some good stuff here!

Thanks a bunch!



PS. In one issue: "Review of Blacet Music Research Phasefilter" I found Blacet's web site recently... still plugging along! it was like going back in time and reading Polyphony! (I still have the first issue of that too)

[steve]

Anderton wrote up some great stuff. I had the entire
Now I'm trying to find the first version of EPFM... He changed some of the projects in the second one...i.e., added the revised version of the Tube Sound Fuzz (the one without the driver op amp).

How can you tell the early version? I have an old copy, and it doesn't say anything about second version. It is copyright 1975, 1978, and 1980. It looks like my copy was printed in 9/84.

steve

[David Schwab]

How can you tell the early version? I have an old copy, and it doesn't say anything about second version. It is copyright 1975, 1978, and 1980. It looks like my copy was printed in 9/84.

steve

That's the newer copy.

The original version of EPFM had a different cover... it was Anderton with a guitar... the newer cover shows a workbench with a guitar and a bunch of effects and tools and stuff. The original would be from 1975. He revised it in 1980.

The original version had a project for a stereo bass/treble tone control, and the newer version replaced that with the revised Tube Sound Fuzz project. I seem to remember, the original TSF was a project featured in Guitar Player, and the circuit was a little different. It had an op amp driver before the 4049 hex inverter. I had built one of these way back, and removed the op amp and replaced it with a jumper in the socket... that cleaned the sound up a lot... the original only went from very distorted to ultra distorted! I guess Anderton came to the same conclusion!

Also the original Super Tone Control had switches for each filter section, and the newer version uses pots and a mixer.

There might be other differences, but that's all I remember.

I found some copies on line... not too bad, about $15. I recently got an original copy of Home Recording for Musicians on eBay for $1! Some clean copies of that were on Amazon for $150+!

Incidentally, it's not credited anywhere, but the original cover for Home Recording for Musicians show's a young Sting sitting in his flat with a 4 track and his bass and some guitars!

[StephenGiles]

Some of the folks I see in the commuter bus sit reading their Bibles, some reading their Korans, and some reading their Dean Koontz. Me, I read my binders of old articles and schems.

Hey Mark, that's the only thing I miss about commuting into London - being able to read old articles and schematics, especially 1970s copies of Polyphony!

[Mark Hammer]

Actually, there were a fair number of differences.

• Each project included a list of what could be modified to what ends
• Each project included more detailed specs
• The pads for leads generally come out to only one edge on the PCBs in the 2nd edition, and often two sides in the 1st.
• The projects tended to have more control/features built into them in the 2nd.
• The semiconductors tended to be a little more commonly found int he 2nd. E.g., the first used an NE531 op-amp for the treble booster.
• There were more projects in the 2nd than in the first.

All told, the 2nd edition is a better purchase, and happily is still available from many places. I have most of the first one photocopied, and I'd have to say that the brunt of the projects in the 2nd edition are of higher quality, and more instructive in many ways.

[Mark Hammer]

You may be pleased to find that the oh-so-humble Small Stone Phase Shifter, and indeed any phase-shifter using OTAs can be easily converted to a "phasefilter" to great effect. This occurred to me one day while I was perusing both the SS schematics and the datasheets for the SSM chips. I realized that the long-extinct SSM2040 was just a quartet of OTAs, with many of the same control pins as a 3094 or LM13600.

The conventional circuit ties a cap to the input for allpass stages. If you reroute that cap end to ground, exactly as you see in the SSM2040 phaser/filter in DEVICE (and like the Blacet circuit), you convert the section into lowpass. Do it for two stages out of 4 and voila, instant self-contained phasefilter.

Charlie Barth did this, at my urging, to his Small Stone and posted some sound clips here: http://moosapotamus.net/THINGS/frankenstone.htm I don't think the sound clips do it justice, but you can get some idea.

With dry signal lifted, and two of the stages converted from allpass to lowpass, this makes one of the sexiest tremo-viba-phasa-licious things you can imagine. Wihout a dry signal mixed in, the modulated allpass sections make for a gentle vibrato. Followed by a pair of lowpass sections, you get a modulatd wah. Since the two produce a modulated overall volume level, you get a quasi-tremolo (though not true volume modulation). Set for a "Born on the Bayou" or "Baby Scratch My Back" sort of tremolo depth and speed, it is ridiculously seductive and entirely unique. I'm supposed to get together with a fellow who is Sheryl Crow's guitar tech when she comes through town in a couple of weeks, and I'm hoping to get a modded unit to her guitarist, Peter Stroud, to try out. VERY neat effect and not commercially available to the best of my knowledge.

[angelo]

R.G.,
Are you R.G. Keen, or does it stand for "resident guru" or are you just too clever,and both cases are true?
Either way, thanks for the info. That artice on the programmable footswitch. The drawing at the end looks like a system the guy from Rush uses which probably costs tens of thousands of dollars. It will be nice to build this for under $100. Im sure it will be far less challenging than the tube preamp I built last year.