the twisted world of guitar pedals II

Meanwhile I had the opportunity to put my hands on some Fairfield Circuitry effect pedal stuff mentioned earlier here and the “Meet Maude” analog BBD delay was right here on my desk for a deeper inspection. My actual experience was a rather mixed one.

Focusing on a rather dark and LoFi sound quality on the one hand plus a rather simplistic feature set concept wise on the other, they do not appear to be very flexible in practise and this at a rather steep price point. They appear to be very noisy featuring all kinds of artifacts even when integrated to the mixing desk via reamping. One may call this the feature itself but at the end it makes it a one-trick pony. If you need exactly that, here you have it but you get nothing beyond that. To me this trade off was too big and so I send it back.

However, I found their nifty low pass gate implementation (very prominently featured within their “Shallow Water”) that much unique and interesting that I replicated it as a low pass filter alternative in software and to have it available e.g. for filtering delay lines in my productions. The “Shallow Water” box made me almost pull the trigger but all in all I think this stuff seems to be a little bit over-hyped thanks to the interwebs. This pretty much sums it up for now, end of this affair.

Timeline & BigSky – The new dust collectors?

Going into the exact opposite direction might be a funny idea and so I grabbed some Strymon stuff which aims to be the jack of all trades at least regarding digital delay and reverb in a tiny stomp box aka desktop package. To be continued …

Further readings about BBD delays:

• the Ibanez AD202 analog delay
• the Dynacord VRS-23 analog delay

NastyDLA – final teaser and release info

NastyDLA – technical architecture

simplified technical architecture

Internally, NastyDLA consists of quite a bunch of DSP processing building blocks which as a whole are summing up to an authentic signal path simulation of it’s analog models. The blocks and the according signal flow are shown in the diagram above. Basic signal flow goes from left to right except the feedback path which goes in the opposite direction.

With NastyDLA, signal path coloration already starts in the input stage which provides a complete model of both, frequency and phase response as well as dynamic saturation. It’s located in the dry path but all nonlinear processing and coloring can be disabled on demand so it remains as a simple input volume control then. But while switched in, the input stage can greatly contribute on getting the processed signal to fit right into a mix.