The Hammond Novachord is a very early early synthesizer, one of those things that was overly ambitious and so impractical as to make it far beyond the reach of most of us, but way cool to those of us who enjoy the esoteric. Hm, what your synth can only play one note at a time, or only eight? This one, made from 1939-1942 could play 72 notes at once, and if I had one, that’s all I’d do with it, well maybe.
It featured 163 vacuum tubes and over 1,000 custom capacitors and was about the size of two spinet pianos.
The unique divide down oscillator architecture permitted all 72 notes to be played in unison. This was achieved through the use of vacuum tube monostable circuits permitting several octaves of like notes to be master tuned from one of 12 top octave oscillators.
Found here, and there’s an article about restoring one here.
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When it comes to pitch shifting, the guitar world has been a single note world for the last thirty or so years, unless you had the money to pick up an Eventide, which let’s face it, none of us ever did. Then came the Pog, the Poly Octave Generator by Electroharmonix. This box could magically track chords for a couple hundred dollars.
What more could I ask for, another big box for my board, lots of sliders and it could make a lot of different tones. I actually avoid most pitchshifters, Whammys and the like, but this one was a source of want (Sadly, I haven’t been able to pick one up for myself yet, but the donation button on the right will help that along). Electorharmonix had created a tweakerbox for it’s core audience.
As we explored it, we also found that it had some interesting advantages for other instruments, especially reed instruments like harmonica and sax. The issue a sax or harmonica player would come across is the extra harmonic frequencies would confuse any pedal into a confused whargarble of confused noise. This pedal tracks these wonderfully, which has been a well-kept secret until now.
The Micro Pog is the baby brother of the Pog, and gives us all the same tracking without all of those sliders. Three controls is all we get to play with on this one.
The Basics
The Micro Pog has three controls, each a level for the octave down and octave up synthesized signals, and one for the dry signal level.
The Good
This pedal tracks like a dream. It’s effect is instantaneous and never wavers. Single note lines, chords, it works on everything. It’s like getting a twelve string that you can turn on and off at the click of a footswitch. The octave up can, with a little fuzz, sound like an Octavia, and the octave down adds a good low push to your sound that is as good as an average octaver. The combined effect is a full harmonic attack that sounds like a rock organ. Despite having only the three controls, there’s a fair amount of controls.
The pedal picks up every subtle frequency of your instrument, and creates the octave of each, which fills in a quite a bit of sonic space on its own.
Due to its ability to reproduce so many frequencies, this pedal can be placed about anywhere in the chain, meaning you can get some interesting multiplied harmonics and other interesting effects depending on where you put it in your signal chain. Most pitch shifting effects really want to be at the front of your chain and get a pure clean signal. I didn’t get to play with this too much, I want to get my hands on the full sized Pog or even the Hog to play with these ideas.
The Bad
This is good and all, but the rich overtone creation means I sound like a rock organ all the time. I’m not a huge fan of the rock organ, and I get tired of it. Here and there, I could see using this, but as a go-to effect for all my octave needs, not so much. I’d like to see a way to narrow the reproduction of harmonics.
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The Catalyst is a new pedal by Fulltone with a lot to prove. Anything that claims to be a clean gain boost, an overdrive, a distortion, and a fuzz, all competently, has created a lot of expectation before the box is even opened. All of these, depending on just what you’re aiming for, are points on a spectrum, but getting all of them in one pedal? That’s the stuff of myths, right?
In The Catalyst, Fulltone makes a very bold attempt at this trick, and it comes fairly near to success, depending on what you’re looking for. The distortions and fuzzes it can produce are not very tight, and so are good for classic rock and grungy tones, but if you want a bit of edge to your sound, a little more dark bottom to your sound, this isn’t the pedal for you.
The Basics
The controls are mostly your basic Overdrive / distortion fare, volume and gain on large knobs, a bass/mids and treble on smaller pots, and a mini toggle labeled spark/flame. This control essentially switches between a mostly clean channel to a mostly dirty channel. I say mostly because it the pedal will dirty up quite a bit at the end of the gain spectrum on the spark setting. Switching is standard true bypass.
The input impedance on this pedal is around 1 megOhm, meaning it is very nice for instruments with weaker pickups, vintage humbuckers or passive piezo should work very well with this pedal. The output winds up more at 10kOhm, meaning this is a good front of the chain pedal, capable of getting a weaker signal up to a good level for other things in line, like noise gates, pitch shifters or compressors that are very sensitive to input levels.
This pedal might actually make a good entry into the boutique market for a graduating from novice musician. It’s several pedals in one, with a good amount of flexibility, at a fair price for the market. That’s a lot of win in one box.
The Good
We have to cover the Catalyst in two parts, Spark and Flame, since these two modes are so different from each other. With the switch in the spark setting, the pedal goes from clean gain, through overdrive, and into distortion. Its in this setting that I really wish we had a potentiometer that had something between standard taper and a linear taper, because the transition between clean gain and full distortion is all in the last quarter or so of the travel.
On the other hand, the drive sounds great at just about any point on that knob. The overdrive part of the travel sounds great, and give just a little more kick to your signal in a slightly grittier than a TS9 Tube Screamer kind of way.
Then the distortion kicks in, and it’s a pretty good rawkus distortion, with a nice breakup for rock with a bit of a vintage edge to it.
Flip that switch to spark, and you’ve got a whole different beast. It’s instantly fuzzier, with a lot of gain until it gets to a full fuzz reminiscent of a fuzz face, but with a modern clarity to it. The all-important test of complex chords it handled with ease, producing a rich and clear seventh chord at even full gain.
In this setting, the gain has a much smoother taper, but since it starts fairly dirty, you don’t see quite the metamorphosis that you do on the spark setting. That’s fine, you don’t need it.
The bad
You’d think with two bands of EQ control, you’d be able to get a fair amount of tone control out of the pedal, but the lack of an independent mid made this pedal much less versatile than I’d like. Being able to scoop the mids while cranking the low end would really make this a strong offering with quite a bit more to it. I could even use it in a bit of a more modern heavy rock setting with that mid control.
As far as clean gain boost goes, I’m not sure it was quite all it advertised. As I got it to a gain level akin to what I’d want, it would start to break up. I also kind of wanted more push in the treble for the clean gain, and I didn’t get it. It almost makes all of it’s claims, but it falls noticeably short on this one.
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Synthgear.com had an article on The Wurlitzer Sideman, the first drum machine. The sideman had a circuit board with a series of contacts that would play a sample. Unions feared it would be the end of the drummer, but really, could this ever replace a drummer? I would think it was useful as a practice tool, and that was about it. On the other hand it was a big step forward in thinking and design. Read the full article at the link.
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When I first saw these, one feature in particular caught my eye and for a very specific reason, the ability to control the input impedance. I play with a violinist who uses one of the Mark Woods 7 string Vipers which has a passive piezo bridge. This bridge makes effecting and amplifying very tricky, because its output level and impedance don’t really match a magnetic pickup. It is very surprising how this affects various amplifiers. We play some heavy stuff, so we’re looking for a Boogie Triple Rectifier tone or heavier. A Triple Rec actually does a pretty good job at handling his signal, but we’ve landed on a Framus Cobra as his amplifier of choice. We’ve tried a number of other amps with his instrument, and found some amazing differences. We really like VHT amps, but they hardly break up with his impedance level, very disappointing. The Bogner Alchemist amps, which seem to fall a little short for guitarists, bring his instrument to higher spiritual plane. So the ability to impedance match was very enticing.
On the other hand, it is a Zvex distortion, and you never know what you’re going to get out of it. Many of my musician friends don’t like Zvex distortions in general, because they are too complicated, or just not what they are looking for. Let’s face it, Zvex isn’t for everyone. Before plugging into this one, I didn’t know what to expect, and I kind of like going into trying out a pedal this way. I don’t get the preconceived notion of thinking this is going to be the ultimate metal pedal of death.
I liked this pedal. It was a good general purpose distortion with a rich, not very abrasive fuzz and a fair range of tone with not a lot of tweaking to get at it all.
The Basics
The Mastotron is a silicon fuzz design that incorporates a sub control, input impedance trim and pulse width control. Controls are basic for fuzz, volume, fuzz (gain), tone, with the addition of the pulse width and the input impedance. The Sub control is on a three position mini-toggle.
I found that adding this fuzz to a really dirty amp did little to the distortion, though adding it to other pedals will likely do quite a bit more.
The Good
As far as the 7 string violin went, this pedal sounded really good over a clean channel. That is significant, as some pedals have a tendency to amplify the sound of the bow dragging over the strings quite a bit. The frequency of the dragging sound happens to be in the sweet spot, more or less. That input impedance made all the difference in the world for this instrument. If you have fairly weak vintage pickups you’ll want to run it full open, if you have active pickups like EMGs it serves as a good input pad. We found that using it before the amp with just a little fuzz did very good things for the signal and opened the tone quite a bit.
We did notice a very curious effect of the pulse width control. With the control turned all the way up and the amp clean, there would be practically no signal on the backbow stroke, though if you dirtied the amp up, it would come back (mostly). Very odd, and I can’t explain it for sure.
For impedance matching with active pickups, it can help you considerably. Very few effects or amps are designed with active pickups in mind, and slamming them with the signal level of an active pickup can give some very nasty results. I’m thinking in particular about analog delays, flangers, and the like which may fart out because they don’t have the headroom.
On guitar, I found the fuzz quite rich and easily controlled, well within the tonal range and needs of the average player. It had just enough crisp edge to play some dirty rock, and enough fuzz to play some Hendrix or grunge admirably. I could see you cranking this on a Foo Fighters cut or if you wanted to rock out some Green Day. The solo tone actually surprised me for being crisp and rich, without being shrill at any point.
The pulse width control adds a little edge to the creamy fuzz, giving a bit of extra rasp to the tone. Quite handy when you need it. The sub control adds a lot of low end on settings two and three, something that gives a bit more growl to the sound for when you need it. All in all, with all of these little gadgets built in, you get a very flexible pedal.
The bad
As a general distortion is concerned, I’m usually looking for a little more raw gain than this one had. Even with the fuzz knob cranked the level seemed a bit soft, and I just wanted more. In general, even with the volume turned low, the gain will add a level and edge to the signal that this one didn’t seem to. This can be the case with the fuzzier of the fuzz pedals, as the waveform gets wider and fuzzier rather than harder, but this one shouldn’t have done that quite so much as it did.
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When I think of Full Bore Metal, I wasn’t thinking about an indistinguishable buzzbox. I’m a big fan of some of the MXR boxes. I really like the Double Shot distortion for what it does. I was hoping for something that had guts to blow out any song, a low growl that could rival a big amp, or push that Double Shot over the edge, but no, the Full Bore is a buzz box that disappointed me even for what it was.
So that was a curve. And sometimes we have to roll with the curves, so I set out to see what I could get out of this buzzbox, and even as it was, I failed to find a useful tone.
The Basics
The Full Bore has a three band eq with a variable mid frequency, volume, gain and switches for scoop and gate. The trigger level for the gate is on the inside.
The Good
The mid frequency has a good amount of tonal variation, very similar to a Boss MT2 Metal zone without the 80’s metal sound.
The Bad
What they wanted to get was a modern metal buzzy grind. The buzz however is overboard. I never got a good tone out of it for single note soloing, and complex chords were completely indistinguishable, in fact, so were simple power chords. There was nothing in this pedal I found even remotely useful, and while I do play a fair amount of metal, I don’t play very buzzy metal.If I were looking for what this pedal aspires to, I’d Wind up looking at the Way Huge Fat Sandwich as a much better option.
The Specs
Input Impedence: 450 kOhm
Output Impedence: 10 kOhm
Bypass: True Hardwire
Current Draw 18mA
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Let me start off this review by saying that after trying this pedal out, I want it like Homer wants donuts, and I didn’t expect to. I mean, it’s just a delay pedal with a big price tag. I’ve got a Line 6 DL4 that I’m happy with, an old DOD digital that is better than anything Boss has put out for a while, a couple of analog delays, a tape echo, what else could I want? Then I tried this one out.
TC has always been a favorite of mine. For a rackmount processor, their G Major and other racks have always been the best, and even their lower level offerings in the modulation/delay/reverb category have been better than the rest, but when you sit down with this thing, be prepared to open your wallet and bleed.
When I look at a digital delay, I’m primarily concerned with the clarity of the delay signal, the noise floor, and everything else from there is functionality details. If a delay can’t make the hurdle of the first tones, it usually isn’t worth messing with. There have been some lower end digital delays or “modeled” delays that haven’t met my basic standards. The TC has the cleanest tone I’ve ever heard in a stompbox bar none. There is no extraneous noise. The tone is as pristine and perfect as I’ve ever heard.
The Basics
The Nova delay features 2,290 milliseconds of delay. Yes, that’s two and a quarter seconds for most of the modes. Controls are fairly basic, time, mix, color, repeats and mode. These is a good sized screen to show exact delay times in miliseconds and a dedicated tap tempo switch. It also has an “Audio Tapping” mode, which will pick up a tempo from your input signal. The LEDs are definitely bright enough to see on a club stage, with a light indicator to show the mode.
One of the unusual features of the time knob is the way you set the time. It is set on a knob that will speed the rate if turned one way, and slow it if turned the other, with a balance point in the middle. The further you turn it from that middle point, the faster the rate changes, so you could, say, nudge it a little and play with the rate slowly ticks up.
The color knob controls the tone of your delay and is marked as a range going from “Tape” through “analog” to “Digital”. It is a fairly good model without being overly artificial or sampled sounding. This knob gives a tremendous amount of flexibility in your tone, though I would say it isn’t as noticeable and lush as my real analog delays or tape echo.
They did think of everything in this pedal, including delay spill over, which allows one delay to play out after you have turned off the pedal or when you change modes.
The Nova offers several modes, including reverse, ping-pong, slapback, dynamic and pan. The dynamic delay is based on the original TC 2290, which allows your delay mix to go down during playing, and pop back out while you pause, very useful in balancing your live sound. The added modulation gives an extra dimension to your signal without being an overwhelming modulation.
You can also save programs to the pedal, though I didn’t experiment with the ease of use on this feature.
Stereo L/R ins and outs give you full flexibility to have a true stereo rig.
The Good
The Nova has the best tone I’ve ever heard in a pedal digital delay, and better than I’ve heard in a number of similarly priced rackmounts. You’d have to go higher in the TC Line to find a better tone. The pedal has more features than a Macbook and all of them are available from the front end. It has everything I could ask for in a delay pedal.
It comes with a 12v power supply, and those extra 3v means this pedal has a lot of headroom and clarity. You won’t hear this pedal distort at all.
The Bad
Hard to find anything to complain about with this pedal except the empty wallet it would leave me with.
Tech specs
It doesn’t say whether it has true bypass or not, but when a pedal is as pristine as this, it doesn’t matter. True bypass is overrated anyway.
Input Impedance: 1Mohm
DA rate: 24 bit 128x oversampling
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When I look at analog delays, my example of the species is the Electroharmonix Deluxe Memory Man. My years of using it has made it the gold standard by which all others must be judged. The MXR Carbon Copy tries hard to attain this status, but misses the mark on key features.
The Basics
The Carbon copy is built into the standard Carling housing, the same as the MXR Phase 90 and Distortion III, so it has a small footprint on your board. It has three knobs on the front, Regeneration, Mix and Delay, as well as a switch to turn on the modulation. The Regeneration knob controls the number of repeats you’ll get, the mix controls the blend between wet and dry signals and the delay knob controls the rate. At the longest, the delay is under a second, so you won’t get a very long slow delay. Status is indicated by the brightest LED the world has ever known. In normal light, it practically blinded me, so onstage, I’d expect it to be a beacon, practically indistinguishable from your pyrotechnics display.
MXR chose to put the controls for the modulation on the inside on two very small potentiometers.
The good Stuff
The tone of the actual delay is rich and muddy, like a good analog delay should be. In this it probably matches the Deluxe Memory Man. They are probably both using the same chips, they sound so close. The quality and clarity of signal might actually surpass the Memory man, being a modern, machine made pedal. The problem is the delay seems to fart out on a clean amp at even moderate signal input levels. I was playing my Schecter C1+, so I know those pickups aren’t that hot. It seems to even fart out at moderate attack levels, which did significantly disappoint me.
The modulation on it is very good, and more subtle than the Electroharmonix. I would prefer this over the EH, which can be in typical EH style a bit strong. For a subtler modulation, this is a good choice. I didn’t futz with the controls at all on the inside to vary the depth or the rate, but was happy with what I heard.
The Bad Stuff
The farting out is a big issue to me. To the player who wants a clean sound, this issue really makes it unusable if you don’t control your attack very carefully. The Memory Man doesn’t have this issue, probably due to having a significant amount of headroom on the input circuit. The MXR runs on 9v and the EH on 24v. I should have tried it with a higher voltage power supply, but I didn’t have one laying around. That might have made the fart go away. I was actually running it on a fresh 9v battery, and that just didn’t serve the task well. Then again, it might have been a fault with the delay chips themselves, and the extra headroom might not have made a difference.
Having modulation controls on the inside may work for some players, but I’m a tweaker. I want those on the outside so I can change in the middle of a set or a song. The controls themselves are on a tiny potentiometer adjustable by precision screwdriver, which is under the four screws of the back of the housing. I need two different tools just to get at them, and that just won’t do.
The small size is nice for a more normal player, but like I said, I’m a tweaker. I like to use my feet to tweak the knobs during songs for nome noisy skronks and odd effects here and there. With this small size, I can’t get a hold of one of these knobs independently of anything else. It would have been better to have the pedal built into a double width housing.
Overall, I’ll stick with the Deluxe Memory Man. Sure it’s more expensive these days, but the value I get for it is worth the extra price. Minus the farts, this would be a great pedal for the set and forget kind of player.
Technical specs
Input Impedance: 1megaohm. Output Impedance 1kohm max Signal to Noise Ratio: Max 104 dB Delay Time: 20ms-600ms Power Draw: 26mA Power supply: 9v
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The brains behind Way Huge produced some of the best stompboxes on the market just prior to the digital modeling revolution, and in fact, J.Tripps of Way Huge was one of the driving forces behind Line 6. Now he’s back with MXR behind him re-releasing the old and designing anew. The Highlight of the line has always been the Swollen Pickle, an overdrive that was going on the market for hundreds of dollars after production of the originals ceased.
Basics
The Fat Sandwich is called a Harmonic Saturator, which is a fancy way of saying “fuzz with lots of buzzy overtones”. The pedal has controls on the front panel for Volume, Distortion, Tone, Presence and Resonance. Internal controls are adjustments for Curve, which adjusts the corner frequencies of the first stage of distortion; Highs, which controls the high end between the two drive stages; and Drive, which adjusts the gain of the second stage of distortion.
The pedal itself is housed in a sturdy metal box that is different from the usual MXR housings, and because of that, much more convenient. Access to the battery is simple, no unscrewing the back plate, no tools required. It also runs off a standard 9v power supply.
The Test Drive
There’s two characters lurking under the hood of this pedal, and they are very dependent on the Tone control. With the tone turned low, the pedal is a decent fuzz that is somewhat on the dark side. If you don’t have a good dedicated fuzz pedal and you need one for a tune in your set, you can probably get away with this pedal, but I want more than that in a pedal. Turn the tone up, and the presence and resonance controls open up. Resonance controls the low frequencies, but you hear it quite a bit in your upper register as well. The frequencies you wind up peaking on this knob get multiplied in the upper register.
The presence control manipulates your higher frequencies, and adds significantly to the buzz. When they combine into your final output tone, it can be pretty wretchedly wonderful, with a lot of raw rasp to your sound. Set just right, the pedal can even sound like it is on the edge of self-oscillation like the ZVex Fuzz Factory, but it is kept under control by the design.
Because it generates higher order harmonics with no synthesis, it can produce a hint of octavia, and tracks complex chords with good distinction.
I’m a fan of having a lot of different distortion tones at my disposal for some types of music. When I have to compete with the sonic flexibility of a synth player, a lot of varied distortion boxes can go a long way. If I had my way, I’d have a dozen boxes in my chain, and the way it processes higher order harmonics makes this a unique box, one I’d certainly want to have in the chain. It has a distinctive sound with a fair amount of flexibility.
The Downside
This isn’t the fuzz pedal for you if you are only into a creamy vintage styled fuzz. This is a raspy pedal with a modern edge to it. In my own needs, I have need of both at various times. If you ever have to ask if I’m that type of player, yes I am. There’s times where I stay with a traditional sound, and other times where I want to be over the edge and modern. This pedal teeters on the edge, and I wish it would go just a little bit further.
The Fat Sandwich can be a noisy box, particularly when distortion and presence are high, which is a shame because that’s also some of the times it sounds best. There was a lot of static even at low amp volume levels. Sometimes that’s the nature of the beast.
Tech specs
Input Impedance: >15kohms Output Impedance <25kohms Signal to noise ratio: 74dB A Weighted Bypass: True Bypass Current Draw: 8.7mA Power Supply: Standard 9v 200mA
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I have a curiosity for new odd instruments, and I’ll feature some of these here and there. Today’s new brilliant instrument is the Eigenharp from Eigenlabs. First a photo, then some videos.
If any of you want to chip in to buy one of these for me, I wouldn’t mind….
Please check out Gearsecure, where we help musicians recover stolen equipment, expose counterfeits and more. We also have a GearWiki, a growing resource for musicians about their gear and anything else musical. Feel free to contribute your knowledge.Find me on Twitter , Facebook, or Youtube.
Purchase my book "Scales for Bass" as a hard copy from lulu.com or digital download from scribd.com
Purchase my book "Scales for Bass" as a hard copy from lulu.com or digital download from scribd.com
