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[PlasticMoonRain]

Hey all:

Just reading the Guitar World cover interview with Tool's Adam Jones and he talks about this wild pedal his engineer made for their new album. It sounded so crazy, I figured you'd all get a kick out of it.

Jones talks about how he has this Gig-FX Chopper pedal he had worked on so he could go from a clean sound to tremolo and control the tremolo speed as well. The pedal let him slow it down and speed it up.

Jones tells his engineer that he wished he could do this with ANY pedal. So the dude does his thing and comes back with what looks like a wah pedal, but you plug your other pedals into it. It blends between your clean sound and the pedal effect, so you can fade in the effect gradually, "like a breath," instead of clicking the pedal on.


Drew

[max cooper]

Hey, nice trick.

I always wondered how hard it would be to take a standard pedal, like a phase shifter and connect, say, the speed parameter to a rocker pedal.


I figured I could just take out the potentiometer and put it in a surplus wah wah and connect it to the board; maybe use a 1/4" so it could be disconnected for transport.

[Bodrio]

Some multiple effects units like Boss Gt 5 include that feature.
With the expression pedal you can control the speed of the phaser, depth of chorus, eq, delay feedback, amount of distortion, etc.

[slicraider]

In the 70's Electro Harmonix made a pedal like a wah with a coiled spring attached to a pot with a thumb screw on the other end . You could remove any knob from another pedal and hook this bad boy up!

Rick Slater
NYC

[Ronny]

Bodrio wrote on Wed, 12 April 2006 17:30

Some multiple effects units like Boss Gt 5 include that feature. With the expression pedal you can control the speed of the phaser, depth of chorus, eq, delay feedback, amount of distortion, etc.

That's correct, 10 years ago Ibanez PT5, Boss ME5, Zoom 4040, Digitech RP series and several other guitar processors had parameter value assignable expession pedals. Nothing new and it's quite commonplace now a days on the pedalboards in the $200 and up range.

[maxim]

ronny wrote:

"Ibanez PT5, Boss ME5, Zoom 4040, Digitech RP series"

now, if only any of them actually sounded any good

[Ronny]

maxim wrote on Thu, 13 April 2006 07:00

ronny wrote: "Ibanez PT5, Boss ME5, Zoom 4040, Digitech RP series" now, if only any of them actually sounded any good

Seldom do any of the guitar fx processors sound good out of the box, the factory pre-sets typically suck, however they can sound quite good when they are in the hands of somebody that knows how to tweak a sound in.

The same can be said of mp3's, many amateurs out there that know nothing of audio, making mp3's. They give mp3's a bad reputation, however an experienced person that encodes from high-res to low compression ratio and knows how to eq for the medium can get much better results and often much more acceptable to the ear, than the amateur encoder with mp3's or the amateur guitar fx tweaker gets by using factory presets that were written by a designer that's never heard your environment, amp or what type of guitar you are using.

[el duderino]

slicraider wrote on Wed, 12 April 2006 19:19

In the 70's Electro Harmonix made a pedal like a wah with a coiled spring attached to a pot with a thumb screw on the other end . You could remove any knob from another pedal and hook this bad boy up! Rick Slater NYC

there is something just like that out now called the Third Hand Thing. i thought it was a great idea when i saw it, didn't realize it had been done already.

[cdr-1]

Quote:

Hey, nice trick. I always wondered how hard it would be to take a standard pedal, like a phase shifter and connect, say, the speed parameter to a rocker pedal. I figured I could just take out the potentiometer and put it in a surplus wah wah and connect it to the board; maybe use a 1/4" so it could be disconnected for transport.

I've had something just like that hooked up to the speed pot of my EHX Memory Man Deluxe for the last 6 or 7 years.

I gutted a voulume pedal because it was the cheapest rocker pedal I could find.

It really works great. That pedal, I found, has a lot more potential when you can control stuff with your feet.

[Mike Butler]

There is a company called "Tone In Progress" that makes a volume type pedal that will control any knob of any pedal. It's very cool. Here's the website...

http://www.toneinprogress.com/

[Brian Kehew]

I work for them, so this may be seen as hype, but it ain't; it's just relevant information!

The MOOG pedals have expression control of almost every knob on the front. You can have FOUR pedals sweeping four knobs on almost every one they make. It is wonderful.

Note: They are also CV inputs (you can put ANY voltage in from sequencer, theremin, MIDI/CV etc). Think about it - ANY knob on a stompbox just raises and lowers a voltage, so shy don't they let you plug in and do it other ways? It's such a simple idea. No one (yet) makes a foot controllable distortion! (I keep asking Moog to do it).

[electrical]

Brian Kehew wrote on Sat, 15 April 2006 19:42

Think about it - ANY knob on a stompbox just raises and lowers a voltage, so shy don't they let you plug in and do it other ways? It's such a simple idea. No one (yet) makes a foot controllable distortion! (I keep asking Moog to do it).

In the case of a (conventional, non-"modeling") distortion pedal, the knobs are changing resistances in a gain circuit, not fixed voltages. For a VC distortion, you would need a VCA in the gain circuit, with a DC control pot on the top of the pedal. This is unnecessarily complicated when a resistor and a pot will work in a conventional circuit instead.

Sure, you could do it, but it would be a pain in the ass, and only one in a thousand people would take advantage of it.

Much easier would be to use a separate VCA prior to a distortion pedal (any distortion pedal) that raises or lowers the level being fed to the distortion, which would effectively control the amount of distortion. It wouldn't affect a feedback circuit, if that's part of the pedal's charm, but it would allow you to CV-control the amount of distortion.