http://poststuff2.entensity.net/021312/fishing.php

most metal fishing ever

That's one way to deal with invasive species.

What kind of fish is that, and why are scores of them flying out of the water?

As a person who is from both sides of his family borne of coastal fish eating people (Hong Kong, England, Denmark) when I see a fish I am thinking of delicious filets. Those might as well have been flying hot dogs.

Caved in and sold my SMMH to buy an EQD dispatch master. God damn thats a nice delay/verb pedal

Yarp, the demos on that one sound fucking wunderbahr. The noise it makes just has a "mood" to it. What is in that one? Is it PT2399-based, or is it some sort of PIC sort of digital whizzbang?

Its a DSP chip doofer so its magic beyond my station
My friend has one and its fucking so creamy. The verb and delay signals are in parallel so it doesn't mush your tone up and it sounds totally righteous with a sonic titan. It makes me want to explore wild lead lines and thats not usually my thing at all haha.

Yarr, DSP figures. It almost sounds like something that could be achieved through more ghetto means(like two to four PT2399s?), but i suspect that the details of making it go and sound as good would be more than the results of that particular course would be worth.

I've never tinkered with any of those. I should probably have a poke with some at some point. Or I could just learn how to program PIC... I can code after all.

The PT2399s are pretty rad. They aren't really designed to be used in multiples really, but they can be(this is essentially what all of teh Belton Brick-based reverbs are anyhow). And they are very flexible lo-fi delay chips. And they are like $0.50 a piece at Tayda.

PICs/DSP are clearly the wave of the future though, the flexibility is key. Shit is too pricy to get into for myself at the moment though. The programming interfaces are one thing, but the chips, RAM, and supporting doo-dads are all also steepish for DIY stompboxes at the rate i build things. Kind of the same reason i don't have a set of real fret files. Too many dollars for them, when i can bodge something together with what is already available to me.

I'll put some on my next tayda order and breadboard some shit up.

The DIY thread over on HCFX is all PIC/DSP chat right now. I clocked that one of the chips has a mini usb built in to program it which is nice. It was $25 though Tape uses a lot of that stuff to good effect although a lot of this stuff looks a bit too SMD for my level.

They're Asian carp, I forget the species name. But they're an invasive species in many US waterways, especially in that area. They are very bad for the local freshwater ecosystem, killing off or displacing native species. And as you can see by their jumpiness, hazardous to people on the water. Much like pythons in the Everglades, or feral hogs in the American south, they have no business being there and really eff things up by their presence, and should be terminated with extreme prejudice.

So yeah, feel free to head down to that area and bag yourself as many delicious Asian carps as you can. They'll thank you for it.

Yarp, i saw that at FX. On the one hand i really like the idea of the flexibility of the DSP thing, and just some of the wacky shit that can be done with digital pots and coding. On the other hand, listening to the nerdtalk about what it takes to build in that format, it kind of comes to my mind, how much i really enjoy just beating the shit out of transistors and opamps in real life on the breadboard, where you sometimes get different results than expected, but it is cheap to fuck with, and sometimes the unexpected results are awesome.

DSP is fantastic for time-based, pitch-based, volume-based sorts of effects though. Especially shit that is either dirty or a pain in the balls to do with more-like-analog means. In addition to shit that is practically impossible to do with analog bits.

As for SMD, i am not against it at all, actually i think it is kind of great. BUT. I am not at all equipped to build with it right now, aside from having some tiny soldering tips. First and foremost, i would have to get set up for PCB making, which i have been half-avoiding for a while now, though i am starting to come around to the idea of bringing it into my method in the relative near future. Then i would actually have to start stocking up on SMD components which would be another pretty big step. I have kind of a minifucktonne of through-hole shit at the moment. To have to go and get all of those values of resistors and caps and ICs and transistors, but in SMD, would kind of suck. So that isn't going to be happening any time soon.

Yeah its purely for time based wacky shit I'd want it for. For dirt tones I'll stick with transistors and op amps.

I would also for sure encourage you to look into playing with the PT chips for some time-based fuckingaroundnesses. The two biggest downsides are that:

1. Though they are digital chips, the repeats are fucking filthy(not in a good way, more in like an MP3 aliasing sort of way) and need to be filtered all to shit to block it out, which is why they are generally considered ideal for all of these "analog-sounding" delay circuits you will find about. It just limits their flexibility somewhat, they will never do a really crisp Boss digital style repeat.

and

2. Though they cram a lot of really useful shit into a fairly small package, they chose not to include a clock input, that would simplify, for instance, running multiples of them synced together with any sort of precision, and minimal unnecessary bonus noise.

That said, they are fucking cool as hell. The standard data sheet notes schematic(basically what the main DIY Rebote projects are based on) is a good basic analog-style delay. Two of the chips in one box makes a nice punk rock ping pong, ala the BYOC project. Four of them can do a quite solid reverb, ala the Belton Brick, and the whole mess of boutiquey reverbs based off of it.

Also, they can be slightly 'misused' to produce one of the simplest-to-build choruses ever(my hate for chorus as an effect aside). And also for such wacky devices as the Mid-Fi Pitch Pirate.

It is a pretty ghetto way to get delay sounds, not flawed and pretty like a BBD proper analog sort of method(but a million times simpler and cheaper to build with) and not purely functional and precise like a Boss DD-whatever, but that is actually kind of part of its charm for me. It is straight up cheap and ugly, but you can work with the kind of ugly it is.

If I were some sort of hobo I'd go live there and eat carp all day.

One of my next jobs is to assemble a big fucking pedal prototyping rig so I can dick with this sort of stuff One trick I'm keen to try and have spoken with phil of DCCE (who is our fx guy) about quite a lot in the last 6 months is running more shit in parallel to toan maximisation!

Yeya. The current version of what started as the torfuzz has basically two not-really-related circuits running parallel then being mixed later, as a sort of notquitedirect tone control.

Also, on the subject of PT2399s, there is a dood over at DIYStompboxes who drew up a pretty slick delayamofier with i think four PTs in parallel wif eachother, that functions basically like a punk rock emulation of the (awesome) Binson Echorec.

One of my favorite things about drawing up fx, is just how many ways there are to mess with them. It is like big kid Legos.

I need to learn more about fx electronics. I've gotten a good hold on toobs now, or so I hope. I guess we'll see how the first few prototype doom bastards come out
give me dangerous legos!

Pedals are definitely the (generally) less dangerous of the electrolego world. Though, that one time i completely miswired the LM386 was... interesting. The entire top of the chip exploded off and tried to put my eye out(the thwarting of these attempts is just one of several reasons i wear glasses).

But like, to get them to do that you have to do something really stupid, like: out of general force of habit, wire a power amp chip as if it was an opamp(very different pinouts).

Moastly it is just good times though. Just pay attention to polarity for diodes and electrolytics, and like generally, err, don't mix the old reds and blacks of the PSU together, at the source or in the chips.

The breadboard, i must say was one of the finest tools i have acquired. I do not now why i put it off so long. I could have saved a lot of time and dollars if i had started there with my experiments, instead of building that first fifty or so different boosters and fuzzes on veroboard.

Its mainly because I hate vero. fuck that stuff haha