#beelzeverb666

[mysynthfetish]

Pedals, Predicaments, and Pain.

I ordered a pedal off eBay way back in maybe late October/early November last year. It seems forever ago. Anyway, here it is:

The Harmonic Perkolator. It’s a clone of the pedal Steve Albini used, sorta part of his signature sound from a certain era. Anyway, the seller looked like he was legit, an electronics tech or engineer in Poland. Some reviews said shipping took forever and there was little or very slow communication. Couldn’t be THAT bad, could it? Heh. Yeah, it could, it really could. But, the pedals all looked very well constructed, and he uses high-quality parts, and the designs are pretty damn good so I took a chance. I’m still not sure if it was worth it after all I went through just to get this pedal. First, when I tried to buy it, I got a “seller may not ship to Japan” warning. So, I contacted him, and he got right back to me, saying it wouldn’t be a problem, shipping anywhere in the world is just 7 Euro, no big deal, let’s do business. Right. That should have set off alarms. 7 Euro shipping worldwide? That shit ain’t gonna arrive no time soon. It probably came over by canoe or something. I didn’t get the fucking thing until January! Waiting, waiting, waiting, trying to get a tracking number, not getting a response for days, and even then it was something like “postal worker put wrong classification on package. Simple problem. You get package soon. I have this problem before.” And that was like the second week of December or something. Anyway, it FINALLY arrived and I was like goddam, about fucking time! But then I plug it in and fooled with it, running synths and an SG copy I have here through it, and the results were, well, not what I expected, to put it nicely— Fucking bullshit to say how I really feel. First of all, I don’t hear any real change by twiddling the Harmonics knob. Maybe something is happening, but the change is so subtle that it is almost unnoticeable. Then there’s the Balance knob, which may be an error, having been labeled as Balance when it really works like a Volume knob. With the Balance all the way counterclockwise, you get no sound at all. I contacted the seller about this around January 7th, and I did get a rather quick reply stating “I will write you tomorrow,” only to never hear from him again. And to add insult to injury, the timeframe for me to review the transaction has expired, it seems, so I’m stuck with this great-looking, very well-constructed pedal that doesn’t seem to work the way I thought it would. Moral of this story? Buyer Beware. It’s the age of the internet, I know, and I buy shit online way more than in actual shops, but in cases like this I really wish I had a shop to go to and demand a refund.

custompedals_pl is the guy’s eBay thing. I had a look and there are no more pedals listed. Maybe someone got tired of his slow shit and paid him a visit. Damn shame. I could throw the fucking thing on the auction here and maybe recover my loss, but who knows. Not a happy camper about this experience.

In other news, I have been slowly building a pedal myself, a clone of Death By Audio’s Reverb Machine. I started gathering parts way back in November, figuring I’d have time over winter break to build the thing but then I got the flu so there went that idea. Here’s the strip board when I was finished soldering components:

The big black marketed out area is where I put the reverb brick. All said and done, it may have cost me about $60 plus half a day’s worth of soldering and wiring and carrying on to get this done. Here it is after I’d assembled and tested it:

Not bad looking, and maybe I shoulda left it alone at that stage. But I like to fuck around with stuff and personalize things and make them my own, so I took everything out and broke out the mini-anvil (really it’s a 4-inch-or-so long slice of a train rail, or at least that’s what it looks like, and it weighs a goddam ton) and the letter punch set I bought for cheap off amazon, and went to work. Here’s the final result:

Weird lighting because an LED light was on, so the pedal has a weird color cast going on. From left to right the knobs are Mix, Death (decay, but feedback past 12 o’clock, it will self-oscillate and very angrily at that), Angst (drive, which goes from bass-erasing at zero to mild boomy oomph around 9 o’clock, all the way to distortion from noon onwards), and <O> which came out like that because I meant to stamp VOL but had the fucking V stamp rotated so it came out < and I was like OH GREAT WORK DIPSHIT! But anyway. Fuck. The Day/Night switch is something like light/dark on the original. Day gives a bright, shiny reverb that has lots of initial reflection-like delays, which Night darkens it up a bit and in combination with the Death and Angst knobs can yield a really dark, long, creepy reverb. I quite like this pedal, and am super happy that I was able to successfully build it. I should mention that the original pedal doesn’t have a Death (decay) knob, that was a mod someone on tagboardeffects suggested. That site is well worth checking out if you’re even curious about building a pedal clone yourself. Fantastic resource.

And now for the pain part. The other day my submixer sort of shat itself. Yay! I was using a Mackie MS1402-VLZ that I bought used off the auction here a few years ago. It’s always been kinda finicky, with left/right balance issues, and a VERY touchy/temperamental AUX 1 Master knob (it fucking loses its shit if you touch it but will remain calm if left alone). It works still, but it’s getting to the point that I have to fiddle with things to get them the way I want them, almost like having to bargain with the mixer and reach a compromise. No more of that shit, I decided to sell it and in the meantime I bought a mixer I used a while back but sold when space became an issue: the Soundcraft Spirit Folio Si 18-2. Here it is:

I’m not all that picky about mixers. I have a wee Yamaha that I use as a sub-mixer for drum machines. I use a Mackie ProFX12 as my main mixer. And I need a sub-mixer that can handle multiple stereo inputs, preferably with sliders for channel volume, and with EQ and at least two Aux sends on each channel. This mixer does just that. Honestly, I almost wish they’d released a version that didn’t have any mono channels, just stereo channels. But this one is as close to what I want as I can get. It wasn’t all that expensive either, so at least I was able to sort of get back up and running within a few days of deciding I didn’t wanna deal with the 1402 and its flippancy anymore. Hehehe. Ah and anyway the soundcraft mixer sounds good, it’s quiet, and the EQs are a bit different from the other mixers so there’s a bit of spice there that adds to the overall flavor, if you get what I’m trying to say. The other funny thing is that right when all this was going on I get one of those notices on FaceButt “three years ago...” or whatever and it was a photo of when I first got one of these exact mixers. Strange how things work out sometimes.