Guitar Pedals for FX on drums n synths and other cheap ways to broaden ya sounds

Heyo,

So I picked up a volca sample a month or two back and I'm enjoying it a lot. A mate of mine 'gave' me a couple of boss distortion pedals that i like running the vsample thru. you can get some filthy, albeit shoddily mixed, sounds coming out of that combo. defs get some shit that makes you wanna smash ya head against a wall (in a good way).

I also ordered the vbass n keys too, and I'm hoping to get the Zoom MS70CDR pedal when I have enough cash saved up. seems like just the thing I need to give the vkeys some oomph. Need a mixer too, gonna get a yammie mg12xu coz that has a few decents sounding FX on it too.

Anyway, you lot all seem pretty experienced with gear and shit, I was wondering what you guys all do to expand the sounds that come out of your bits n bobs.

a loose topic of discussion I know, but was hoping we could have a cozy chat about cheap ways of making shit sound legit.

peace

Record hot to cassette and resample.

EQ and filtering are your friends. Before, after, and without distortion.

Delay is a many-splendored thing.

Routing makes the most out of simple effects. Feedback can open up shitty effects and turn them into unruly beasts.

  On 1/1/2016 at 5:11 AM, sweepstakes said:

Record hot to cassette and resample.

EQ and filtering are your friends. Before, after, and without distortion.

 

Delay is a many-splendored thing.

 

Routing makes the most out of simple effects. Feedback can open up shitty effects and turn them into unruly beasts.

Would EQing on a mixer like the yammie I mentioned be alright enough? It's no professional bit of kit but it fits my budget. I'd like to work out of the box as much as possible since my laptop can't handle 720p porn let alone 8 bars of fruity loops.

Reckon you could expand on the 'routing' side of things? You do that thru a mixer yeh?

I think this yammie has two aux sends, which i think is what i could plug my FX into, but fuck me I donno how. I was thinking of just running the instruments into the pedals then into the mixer channels. and its got enough channels for me to run a wet and dry for each signal (or most of them). Obviously I'm thinking about live jamming, with all instruments mixed from the get go, rather than recording one sound at a time. I reckon tho it'd be easier to record and mix each sound individually, but I kinda wanna keep it quick n dirty coz i like that sound.

Yeah, sure, just use your ears! Some EQs sound better than others, or are more "sculptable" or whatever.

A mixer's the most obvious way to do it. You could use a send to multiple signals into one processor. Or you can just chain stuff in serial in interesting configurations. If you want to get really hardcore about it, get a patchbay, or better yet a matrix mixer.

Yeah, the aux sends will help with routing. If you plug the aux channel into an effect, and then plug its output into a normal channel (instead of the return) you can do feedback. If you have 2 of these, you can have mutual feedback. Some mixers let you send on channels that are muted or turned all the way down and that's more useful for this kind of routing.

  On 1/1/2016 at 5:34 AM, sweepstakes said:

Yeah, sure, just use your ears! Some EQs sound better than others, or are more "sculptable" or whatever.

 

A mixer's the most obvious way to do it. You could use a send to multiple signals into one processor. Or you can just chain stuff in serial in interesting configurations. If you want to get really hardcore about it, get a patchbay, or better yet a matrix mixer.

 

Yeah, the aux sends will help with routing. If you plug the aux channel into an effect, and then plug its output into a normal channel (instead of the return) you can do feedback. If you have 2 of these, you can have mutual feedback. Some mixers let you send on channels that are muted or turned all the way down and that's more useful for this kind of routing.

gnarly thanks man. the mg12xu has 2 AUX sends, but no AUX returns from what I can see. how does that work?

Also, what do you mean by feedback? I'm interested to see how this works, but since I dont have a mixer yet I cant try it. what you described sounds easy enough to implement so I'm interested to see how it works!!

Sorry to just bombard you with questions haha, I don't blame you if you cbf to respond. Been googling, but as with most questions I ask that engine I can never find exactly the thing that will placate my ignorance!

all the best

Oh it's cool, I like talking about this stuff or I wouldn't be here :)

No aux returns is OK - just use a normal channel like I was saying. Some mixers have separate return channels and usually you can't send from that channel -> no feedback.

Feedback is just like what it sounds. You're taking the output of a processor and plugging it back into its input. With an aux send, it's like a mixer specifically for that processor. So you can control the amount of feedback just by controlling the send level going into itself. Most things, in fact pretty much everything, gets really LOUD when you mess with feedback, so you have to be careful about levels - start low. But you can get some unique textures this way - using stompboxes in this configuration is sometimes called the "poor man's modular".

Hardware - tiny amounts of lots of stuff. Putting lots of effects, modulations, and pulses and making them barely noticeable can make your sound a lot more better in lots of ways. Also automated panning techniques and EQ cuts along all of your gear helps go a long way. Dry/wet mix techniques can turn you into an audio Bob Ross with a lot of practice.

Software - Two words: sample offset

A lot of pedals that are pretty unexciting on their own get a lot better if you have two of them.

guitar pedals are your friends. behringer vd400 delay isn't that much of a fancy pedal, but turn up the feedback to the sweetpsot and you can take a simple piano fill and turn it into melodic noisy ambience. big muffs are great for drums becasue they transmit bass fairly well and compress the shit out of everything. boss cs3 is super cheap and very brutal as far as compression goes, also great for drums (i liked it best with volca beats, especially the hihats). exar fl02 is dirt cheap flanger that can produce chorus, weird autechre-y metallic sounds and other flangery goodness. also - old, midiless and barely editable rack reverbs/delays/flangers from central europe are usually great for some eerieness and very cheap.

the only downside with pedals is that they work best used directly with the instruemnt rather than in an fx chain on a mixer.

If you use pedals on line level signals a lot, you should see about building or having a friend build one of these.

If you didn't need XLR jacks or a metal enclosure you could get one together for well under $20 and they work great. In fact, I'd recommend not even bothering with the two different modes, the resistive one has never been very useful for me. All you really need is one inductor, one resistor, one transformer and two jacks, the volume control is handy but not really necessary. How much difference it will make depends on what you use it with, but some things (distortions in particular) sound quite a bit different.