Stomp Boxes

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1731 Location: Norway

Stompboxes are a source of inspi-/fasci-/frustration. Let's talk about em in here! I want horror stories, trciks, tips, dos/donts, stories of pedals you've bought, ones you should've-could've bought, ones you want and ones you'd like to warn us against. This is meant to be a pedal-schmooze.
Bring it on!

Inventor · Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 6:10 pm Post subject:

A pedal-schmooze eh, Oskar? Well we all know that the rules of schmooze are that anything goes, so I'm writing with the notion that computers count as pedals. After all, I don't own any pedals because I can do lots of pedal effects with ChucK.

So my pedal-schmooze is that my latest creation is a software pedal that makes the guitar talk like a talkbox. Just listen to the attached mp3 file and you'll hear the result of me singing Peter Frampton's famous "Do you feel like I do?" and strumming open chords into this software pedal. After trying this on and off for many months now, I have finally gotten good results.

Actually the program is not real time because my eMac does not allow the microphone and the line-in to work at the same time. So I made it record the vocals to a wav file and then in another mode, play back the vocals into headphones while receiving the guitar on the line-in jack. The result is written to another wav file.

Later when I get a USB soundcard I'll write a real time version of the program. Also I wonder if this would be a good project for a commercial pedal or a DIY project.

VocalMixFrampton1.mp3

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Inventor · Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2008 4:57 am Post subject:

I wanted to do the talking guitar effect in real time and it may be a long time until i fit any music hardware into my budget, so I gave it some thought and realized that the line-in jack is stereo, so it obviously has two channels. The guitar only takes up one channel, so I reasoned that I could build a little microphone / guitar DIY box to send the guitar in on one channel and the mic in on the other.

So I built such a thing, well actually I already had a box with some jacks and a battery compartment anyway so it didn't take very long to build. I put in a quad opamp to boost the mic and guitar signals to line levels and after a little trial and error the thing actually works!

The only problem is that the new setup with the box and a real-time ChucK program, the output signal has the guitar prominent and the vocal effect very subdued. I think this is because the mic is very sensitive and it is picking up the sound of the guitar strings themselves. That or the high gain of about 500 required to boost the mic signal is picking up some of the guitar signal from crosstalk.

Actually I just realized that I forgot to put in decoupling caps on the supply rail, so it probably is crosstalk. I'll tinker with it a little and see if I can improve the situation. It's a good start anyway.

Wout Blommers

So what about the Behringer BSY 600
http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/BSY600.aspx#features
(sorry for the bad shaped web page...)
Is this thing worth anything?
How about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWVomPRx-kE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ1dyz3k_IU&NR=1

Smile

Wout