# Reaching for the Uncommon Modulation Effect



## Guest (Jan 28, 2009)

I decide to dig a little deeper into my ModFactor tonight. I've really only just scratched the surface. Here are a few that came out in the wash.

*Slow Gear Auto-Swell*
Tremolo/Pan
Intensity: To Taste, I like 0
Type: Opto or Bias -- your choice, I like Opto
Depth: 100
Speed (Sensitivity): To suit
Shape: ADSR
Xnob: 0 (I think it's unused)
No secondary modulation employed
Notes: Adjust the sensitivity to suit your attack. Pick soft to swell. Hard to keep it wide open. I wish you could adjust the rising and falling edge of the ADSR -- can you? I can't see how. Anyone know? I find they're symmetrical right now and I'd rather a quick rise, long fall for a better pedal steel like effect. It's not bad, but with tweaks it'd be way better.

http://ian.coastpedalboards.com/sounds/modfactor/slow-gear.mp3


*Step Wah*
Q-Wah
Intensity: 15
Type: VOC-WAH
Depth: T..U..NE
Speed: 8.38 Hz
Shape: SMP/HLD
Xnob: Base: 30
No secondary modulation employed
I was looking something that added synth-type filter motion to held chords. And this does the trick. I preferred the vocal wah options to the standard wahwah mode. They just felt better. With a ducking infinite delay (courtesy the superdelay) it gets tripy. With an outboard (empress effects) tremolo it gets...well...see for yourself.  Ian likes it.

http://ian.coastpedalboards.com/sounds/modfactor/step-wah.mp3



That's it for tonight. Tomorrow I'm going to poke around in the ModFilter mode. I think some of the step filter stuff used there could get very excellent results.


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## bagpipe (Sep 19, 2006)

Sounds cool - especially the 2nd one where you kick in the external delay and trem. Its kinda strange but I get that _*exact*_ effect from my Boss PH-3 phaser. 

I must admit that I didn't even know what a Modfactor was - I had to look it up. Cool pedal - looks to be very versatile. Theres a on-line demo for other Modfactor neophytes like myself:

http://www.eventidestompboxes.com/ModFactorPresetsDemo1.html


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Nice. Gotta love S & H effects. There is a "step" function on the Tone Core Liqui-Flange that does that too. When I received it for beta-testing, I wrote back to Jeorge Tripps that he could expect to hear that patch in the opening riffs of a lot of singles. Just a neat way of establishing a tempo.

Now that I've got my other pedals up and running, I'll have to post a sample of "reprocessing" in the Echo Park. It has two ins and outs, but is not true stereo. So, while what goes into A comes out primarily from A, there is some A represented in B's output. However, you can plug into A, then take A's output to the B input, and send *B*'s output to the amp. Because that first stage of processing shows up in the B output too, you get an interesting combination of stuff that is processed once, and stuff that has been reprocessed multiple times in diverse ways (remember that B's output shows up in A as well! ). Two of the patches on the Echo Park really show off what this can do: swell (a Slow Gear type auto-swell for each iteration), and sweep (which is a simple lowpass filter sweep per iteration). I'll have to post a clip or two when I get a chance.

What I did manage to post a rather shabby clip of was the Boss RPH-10 I bought and modified the other week. I installed an envelope follower in it, that can be used alone or in tandem with the LFO. You can find out more here: http://hammer.ampage.org


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## Guest (Jan 28, 2009)

Mark, I'll try and do a clip with _your_ uncommon modulation effect tonight. The phaser/vibe swamp thing.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Looking forward to it.:smile:


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## Alien8 (Jan 8, 2009)

I'm a big fan of those eventide pedals, but since I'm running the MOOG moogerfoogers now, there isn't much they can't be wired to do - except for a good flange effect; haven't found that yet... I'll have to see if I can make a similar sound.

Mark, kksjur that idea with the echo park is fantastic, I don't know why I haven't thought of that one yet, especially with the moogs in that loop!!


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Both the Liqui-Flange and Echo Park come with stereo docks. I was screwing aroud at someone's band practice one evening and we patched one of the Liqui-Flange channels between A-out-back-to-B-in loop and stuck the other Liqui-Flange channel on the final output of the Echo Park.....or something like that. Re-flanging in tandem with re-delay is sick, sick, sick.kkjuw

Depending on what you stick in that channel-out-back-to-other-channel-in loop, you may need to assure some control over volume, lest things break out into unmusical oscillation and runaway feedback. A volume pedal isn't such a bad idea.

What got me started on this stuff was Craig Anderton's experiments with the early floor model harmonizer "pedal" from A/DA (see the review in DEVICE here: http://hammer.ampage.org around page 10 or 11) that allowed recirculation of the pitch-shifted output. Re-shifting netted some interesting "bell tree" effects apparently. I figured that re-delay and re-flange ought to be at least as interesting as re-shift...and it is!

I kept telling Jeorge Tripps, when he was at Line 6, that the soundclips they had posted for the Tonecore series simply did not do justice to the stereo possibilities, but they never seemed to upgrade the samples before he left there for Dunlop. He did tell me about one stereo "easter egg" though. the Tonecore Otto Filter has a "talking filter" mode that is basically one bandpass filter swept upward while another is swept downward. Although the pedal normally comes in a mono dock, you can pop the little plastic modules and stick them in eiother mono or stereo docks. When the Otto Filter gets plunked in a stereo dock, the two counterswept filters come out separate outputs. Plug those two outputs into separate amps and what you hear is an envelope controlled filter that moves when you strike the strings, and seems to move more when you hit them harder. Neat!

Given that I'm currently inundated with phasers, I also did my own phaser experiments, and found that if I cascaded two phasers, setting the first one for a slow medium-wide sweep with medium resonance, and the second for a fast medium-wide sweep with lots of resonance, it behaves a bit like something in between a S&H type phaser (a la PH-3) and a normal periodic phaser (up then down then up....). far more interesting.


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2009)

Alright, so this track took me a while tonight to fit together. It's very much assembled to showcase the effects. Which is my way of saying: excuse my ass-tastic playing! :smile:

Both of these are mhammer effects. The clean guitar is Mark's phasefilter pedal. I'll let Mark explain the details but it's a wah-like band pass filter moving in unison with a phaser. In cans, loud, it almost sucks and pushes your ear drums out. It gets swampy and swirly and 3D. The slide is done with Mark's Scrambler Plus -- which I have to say takes a cool, but only semi-useful pedal due to its unpredictability, and marries it with features that make it sound just fantastic: texture control for rasp and edge, a drive control for the (IIRC D+) preamp, a mix to blend the scrambler mess with the lovely D+ drive and volume control to ensure you're sawing heads when you flick it on. This is a true noise making masterpiece here.

http://ian.coastpedalboards.com/sounds/mhammer/pf-splus.mp3


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2009)

Alien8 said:


> I'm a big fan of those eventide pedals, but since I'm running the MOOG moogerfoogers now, there isn't much they can't be wired to do - except for a good flange effect; haven't found that yet... I'll have to see if I can make a similar sound.


Ohhh...there's a great TZF on the ModFactor...

I'd love to hear some Moog samples. I seem 'em on boards, but can't say I've ever witnessed one (knowingly) in the flesh so to speak.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Very nice, Ian. Wonder where I can buy one of those.:smilie_flagge17:

The phasefilter is something that can be done with any Small Stone, DOD FX20 or similar phaser. If you google around and look at the datasheets for the now out-of-production SSM2040 filter chip, and also pop over to my website to read the two voltage-controlled phase-shifter projects described in DEVICE (around page 10/11 at http://hammer.ampage.org ), you'll see that with any phaser that uses transconductance amplifiers like the CA3094, CA3080, LM13600/13700, et al., changing a phase-shift (allpass) stage to a lowpass stage consists of simply rerouting a single capacitor in that stage from the input to ground. Do that for two of the stages in a standard 4-stage phaser, and you have two phase-shift stages (yielding one notch) and two lowpass stages, yielding a sort of auto-wah. Blacet Electronics used to make a synth module in the late 70's called a "phasefilter" which uses the same principle, but based around an SSM2040. It wasn't until some 25 years later that I realized the similarity between the SSM2040 (which houses 4 OTAs) and an LM13600 (which houses 2 of them), and deduced that the same mod could be done to a simple commercial 4-stage phaser. As you can hear from Ian's sample, it produces an effect which is sort of like a phaser, but not quite. When you use only phase-shifted/filtered signal, and eliminate the clean signal normally required to produces cancellations, you get this thing which is part vibrato, part tremolo, and part autowah. You can do this to any early/later issue Small Stone. If folks want to know how, drop me a PM.

The Scrambler+ is simply a modded MXR Distorion+ and an Ampeg Scrambler I made in the same box with one master switch bypassing/engaging the whole thing. The D+ output level sets the overall output but also how hard the Scrambler is pushed; something missing in the original Scrambler. turning up the distortion on the D+ section lets you dial in different "qualities" or octaving in the Scrambler. Pushing the Scrambler over the edge gets some delightfully sick sounds.


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## Peter (Mar 25, 2008)

iaresee said:


> Alright, so this track took me a while tonight to fit together. It's very much assembled to showcase the effects. Which is my way of saying: excuse my ass-tastic playing! :smile:
> 
> Both of these are mhammer effects. The clean guitar is Mark's phasefilter pedal. I'll let Mark explain the details but it's a wah-like band pass filter moving in unison with a phaser. In cans, loud, it almost sucks and pushes your ear drums out. It gets swampy and swirly and 3D. The slide is done with Mark's Scrambler Plus -- which I have to say takes a cool, but only semi-useful pedal due to its unpredictability, and marries it with features that make it sound just fantastic: texture control for rasp and edge, a drive control for the (IIRC D+) preamp, a mix to blend the scrambler mess with the lovely D+ drive and volume control to ensure you're sawing heads when you flick it on. This is a true noise making masterpiece here.
> 
> http://ian.coastpedalboards.com/sounds/mhammer/pf-splus.mp3


I love this. :rockon2:


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2009)

mhammer said:


> Very nice, Ian. Wonder where I can buy one of those.:smilie_flagge17:


I think you'd do well selling these two. The phasefilter would be a great contender for the rotating-effect-sim pool. It's marries the Leslie sim with the Univibe clone in a way that's wholly unique -- it really does push and pull nicely in a 3D way.

The Scrambler+ is superb man. There's not a bad sound in that box and there A LOT of sounds in there! Some of them are abrasive and over the top, but hardly bad.


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2009)

DeleriumTrigger said:


> I love this. :rockon2:


Thanks man. Kudos really goes to Mark for the effects. I just noodled around them.


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## Alien8 (Jan 8, 2009)

> I'd love to hear some Moog samples.


Check out the moog music forum under moogerfoogers, there's lots of different samples from lots of users there. I'm record-icaped at the moment... that's what I'm stashing away for now...


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

My favourite octave fuzz has to be the Foxx Tone Machine (which you can buy for cheap as the Danelectro French Toast, and yes it IS a FTM). But, truth be told, most of the classic octave fuzz units, whether Tycho Brahe or Roger Mayer Octavias, Foxx, Superfuzz, Fender Blender, Armstrong Green Ringer, or Ampeg Scrambler generally did not offer much in the way of control to tailor the *quality* of the octave generation. As a result, they tended to be hit or miss. 

In a recent thread on the diystompbox forum, several of us found that our builds of the Tycho Brahe Octavia tended not to be able to produce sweet octaving (as opposed to run-of-the-mill fuzz with an octave somewhere waaaaay in the background) because of generational (as in 60's vs 90's) differences in pot tolerances that made suitable adjustments near impossible with the stock circuit. So, it can sometimes take only just a little bit more tweakability to make a pretty good octaver a *great* octaver. I've been really pleased by what could be extracted from the Scrambler, simply by sticking a front end on it to help tailor the signal that drives it.

I'll put in a plug here for Francisco Pena, in San Salvador, who puts up the Tonepad (www.tonepad.com) website where I got the layouts for both pedals. He sells really nice boards for the various projects he posts, and deserves your business.


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2009)

mhammer said:


> I'll put in a plug here for Francisco Pena, in San Salvador, who puts up the Tonepad (www.tonepad.com) website where I got the layouts for both pedals. He sells really nice boards for the various projects he posts, and deserves your business.


Mark is your Scrambler+ built on just his Scrambler board? Or did you put his D+ and Scrambler PCBs together? I suppose I could just open up the box and look for myself, eh?


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

It's the two.

Funny story about how it came to be. I had purchased a used chassis at the old Computer Recyclers in town and thought "This would be good for a sort of 'Fuzzmania' box with a rotary switch that would let me select between a fistful of different-sounding/different-engine distortions, each of which would have their own drive and level controls. I whipped up a board with a half-dozen different categories of distortion circuit (Big Muff, Bluesbreaker, Scrambler, Dist+, TS-808,Tone Bender) all on the same board. Over time, I got impatient, and just decided to cut out individual sections from the big board to wire them up as individual pedals. What was left was the Scrambler and D+. I thought, "This could work, AND I can fit them both into one box.". Which is what I did. The result was a VERY pleasant surprise.

Serendipity strikes again!


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Okay. I promised it, now here it is: a sample of re-processing using the dual ins and outs of the Line 6 Echo Park. A short 35 second demo of what they can do. Enjoy. http://hammer.ampage.org/


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## Guest (Jan 30, 2009)

mhammer said:


> Enjoy.


Oh I did. Particularly 0:23 on. Cool. Who said you can't strum strings and sound like a synth?


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