Monthly Archives: May 2011

Ibanez Time Machine, AD190

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Posted by Chvad SB on May 30, 2011 – 12:40 pm
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Analog Delay. The kind of you thing you just can’t understand until you have had your hands on one. These were eventually replaced by digital delays due to the digital delay having longer delay times and crisp exact delays with no signal loss. Then, like most things analog, people realized that the analog delay had a certain character that wasn’t easily replicated digitally and that both digital AND analog were cool and could co-exist with one another and all was good with the world.

The Ibanez Time Machine is a table top analog delay not easily fit into either a rack or a pedal board. I’m assuming Ibanez were thinking “on top of amp” would be a great place for these. It has one 1/4″ mono input jack, variable pad switch for the input signal, two 1/4″ mono outputs (dry plus delay and wet only), and seven pots controlling input level, tone, delay time, regeneration (feedback), blend and two for a flanger mode “width” and “speed”.

Here is what I have to say about the AD190 flanger mode. It has a switch. That switch turns on the flanger. The delay is bypassed when flanging. There are two knobs to fuck with the flange. I’m not a flanger fan so we will not be flanging today. That is all I will write about the flanger.

Delay. The BEST. EFFECT. EVER. MADE. It makes everything sounds better. EVERYTHING. If I could delay my late night chinese food delivery it might make that taste better. The “tone” knob on this does what you’d expect but the need for it ebbs and flows as the tone is also radically altered with “delay time” knob. The longer the delay time the darker the tone gets. There is significant loss in upper frequencies with long delay times even with the tone knob turned up all the way but this is not a bad thing. The delayed signals are dark, warm and muddy. You get a gooey mess of a delay that doesn’t fight for your original signals bandwidth and is extremely pleasant to listen to. The shorter the delay time, the brighter the delayed signal and the greater the effect of the “tone” knob. The “regeneration” knob is your delay feedback that will take you from a pleasant one or two delays to a monstrous gain-heavy feedback loop cycle that is more than capable of destroying the finest of well… anything. Watch your gears and ears people. This thing gets loud and rude FAST. It’s awesome. It’ll even start feeding back on it’s own signal path noise without anything being fed into it which makes the AD190 a capable noise generating instrument unto itself in the correct hands.

The bottom line? You like delays? Get it. You like noise? Get it. Want better food? I’m sure this will help.

-Chvad SB
www.chvad.com

Rocktron Hush, The Pedal

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Posted by Chvad SB on May 23, 2011 – 11:33 am
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The Rocktron Hush pedal is a noise reduction pedal with a super simplistic design and if used for the right type of noise it can be pretty effective. The Hush pedal is not a noise gate so it shouldn’t be confused with one. Unlike a noise gate. the Hush doesn’t clamp down on noise around a specified threshold, it attempts to remove the actual noise from the signal with what I am assuming is some type of phase inversion. On slight humming or dirty pickups this is pretty effective. Using the threshold knob you can determine the amount of noise reduction applied and up to about 75% you can remove noise with little audible loss to the signal. Past 75% the is a definite loss in tone in higher frequencies. This pedal is best applied directly out of the guitar before any other pedals. The Hush sitting post-distortion is entirely ineffective. This won’t solve any grounding issues you may be having either. If you are suffering ground related hum look elsewhere.  I get the feeling a lot of people look to this pedal for the wrong reasons and post some pretty negative stuff about it but for what this pedal is intended it does its job extremely well.

-Chvad SB

Rocktron Big Crush

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Posted by Chvad SB on May 16, 2011 – 10:00 am
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The Rocktron Big Crush is a fairly standard compression pedal with a basic set of controls including output level, attack and sustain. It can run off of one 9-volt battery or an external power supply. If you are looking for a transparent noise free compression this does a pretty good job with that. There is a moderate amount of noise with the sustain pushed past 85% but a lot of that is dependent on the signal you are feeding into it. If you are looking for a compression with “character” this is not the pedal for you  as it really is mostly transparent aside from the obvious restricted dynamics of the signal when the sustain is pushed. When bypassed there was no appreciable tone loss. Build-wise this pedal is an absolute tank as most Rocktron pedals tend to be. The jacks and switches are all surface mounted with metal nuts and the knobs are mounted on potentiometers with metal shafts. Even with abusive stomping I can’t imagine any of the components on this breaking anytime soon. The blue LED is annoyingly bright but it doesn’t leave any room for question regarding its power state… when it’s on IT’S ON.

-Chvad SB

Manly Tweaking Your Knobs

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Posted by Chvad SB on May 7, 2011 – 6:40 pm
Filed under Articles, Opinion
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I’d like to be honest about this article: it’s not fair. I have a rampantly biased opinion about the following subject and intend to express it fully here. If you happen to have a deep-rooted insecurity about your knob-tweaking skills, then I suggest you stop reading immediately. If not, then by all means, proceed…

I have always hated laptop-jockeys. “What’s a laptop-jockey,” you ask? That legion of “performers” or “bands” or “DJs” who insist that standing behind a laptop onstage has some form of entertainment value. Oh, and DJ’s? Go fuck off. I don’t care enough about you to even think about whatever value you vultures have anymore. I’m shitting on lazy musicians right now, so go piss off. Aaaaand back to the laptop-jockeys… As a fan they bore me and as a musician I find them insulting AND boring. I’ve seen hacks do it and I’ve seen well respected musicians do it and guess what? Every God-damned time IT FUCKING SUCKS. Here’s some news… your computer is BORING. You are BORING. Worst of all… YOU ARE KILLING YOUR OWN MUSIC because YOU ARE LAZY.

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