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Effects in parallel?


percyexpat

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how easy is this to do? i found something mentioning unity gain and speaker impedence...my newbie brain doesnt understand.

 

say if you wanted to run two octaver's in parallel and mix the signal together rather than have one after the other. how would you go about this?

 

thanks.

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i kind of do this but in a one amp setup by splitting the signal from my volume pedal:

tuner out goes througha bunch of effects including my whammy and then output goes into fx return on the loop of my amp head.

volume pedal output goes into the front end of my amp.

relatively simple two-effect-path setup. with great sounds.

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You need at least a mixing device. Typically with a splitter or a Y cable with something to drive multiple boxes other than directly with your pickups. The right methods avoid making an unintentional feedback looper. Speaker impedance has nothing to do with it. Unity gain just means same volume out as went in, which is typical.

A report on my experiments in that area, written back in '01, is here . I've also used the dry mix path of a Yamaha GEP-50 and multi-amp rigs. Mixing it back together into one amp is different however, sometimes parts of the sound cancel out completely making a new sound where with multiple amps you can always make out the components. My current work also is based on parallel distortion.

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thankyou very much thats exactly what i was looking for :) i will be experimenting with multiple amp setups so i'll bear that in mind, cheers! the mixer thing is pretty obvious but what kinda device would you use to split the signals to begin with? any examples?

cheers.

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Any effect box with a buffer will avoid loading down the guitar by two effects and a Y adapter. But the load isn't necessarily all that bad to drive straight from the guitar, depends on the effect boxes. "Buffer" means the signal goes through electronics (unity-gain amplifiers) rather than true bypass -- most Boss, Ibanez, etc. electronic switched type effects, or almost any box left on all the time.

With a really good mixer you could just run effects loops, but with high gain distortion loops can become unstable and a seperate splitter still is better. The passive dry-wet mix setup in the article I linked relied on a splitter with two seperate outputs.

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what about if you wanted to run more than two effects in parallel? like four or five? i dont know how effective this would be but its an experiment id be interested in trying for the purposes of noise making! would it be particularly hard to make a box to split the signal?

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Originally posted by percyexpat

what about if you wanted to run more than two effects in parallel? like four or five? i dont know how effective this would be but its an experiment id be interested in trying for the purposes of noise making! would it be particularly hard to make a box to split the signal?

 

 

Nah, just build a unity gain buffer with an opamp. That should drive several effects pretty well (exact number would depend on input impedances of the effects and the model op-amp used)

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Originally posted by Tone Doctor

Parallel Distortions is one of the most usefull sounds I have ever messed with. There is so much clarity available because you can assign each distortion to its own frequency range. You also need less crunch and gain in each unit to get a huge overall sound.

 

 

ah haa, thanks for that. the principle appeals to me a lot. it allows for many possibilities in getting a rich, huge sound. i'll be running my setup in stereo with multiple amps which means this makes even more sense i think. i suppose reverbs, stereo delays and stereo modulation want to be used in series but octave effects, distortion etc offer possibilities in parallel. theyre just a bit of a pain to get right cos of all the extra equipment involved!

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Most any decent buffer should be able to handle driving 4-5 different effects simultaneously. You just need more Y-cords. Of course a purpose-built device might do it better. Please note a Y cord is not a mixer to put the sound back together (unless you build one with resistors in it) because that would short outputs together. In a few cases it would work OK but that's the problem with such tricks, or passive mixing in general, you need to know specifics about the circuits in question.

"i suppose reverbs, stereo delays and stereo modulation want to be used in series" ... No, not necessarily. Actually each is already parallel in the sense they mix dry sound with delay. But unless you add something else like distortion to the party, putting them in series reduces intensity. You won't get reverb of the echo or modulation, you'll get dry sound modulated, dry sound echoed, and dry sound reverbed, all adding together. Could be a good thing of course.

On the other hand with my wet-dry mix rig, distortion got chorused and then reverbed and then mixed back in with dry. I could bang chords that distorted the amp with almost no interference from the effects, and then lighten up and the effects would take over.

There's so many possibilities but with the more complex ones you might need some strategy to make it worth a whole lot. With my parallel distortion boxes, two distortions out of phase produce a radical fuzz, where as a third more "rounds out" the effect more, allowing a sound both more normal and more complex at the same time. A fourth parallel distortion seems like overkill, but may eventually get implemented as a means of adding a choice of more distortion types.

With shameless plugs going around, I shall mention I produce the Subzombie fuzz (for less $$ than .. that other number) and previously the Splonkulator, both parallel or mixing distortions. Subzombie, especially, is a lot different approach than the Disnortion. It can produce sounds that sound mixed if you want, but is more aimed at used the mixing as a means of creating and varying a singular fuzz sound.

Someday maybe someone will set up both a Subzombie and Disnortion in parallel for 5 signal paths, plus some other effects in the outside two parallel paths ... heh.

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Originally posted by spentron

Most any decent buffer should be able to handle driving 4-5 different effects simultaneously. You just need more Y-cords. Of course a purpose-built device might do it better. Please note a Y cord is not a mixer to put the sound back together (unless you build one with resistors in it) because that would short outputs together. In a few cases it would work OK but that's the problem with such tricks, or passive mixing in general, you need to know specifics about the circuits in question.


"i suppose reverbs, stereo delays and stereo modulation want to be used in series" ... No, not necessarily. Actually each is already parallel in the sense they mix dry sound with delay. But unless you add something else like distortion to the party, putting them in series reduces intensity. You won't get reverb of the echo or modulation, you'll get dry sound modulated, dry sound echoed, and dry sound reverbed, all adding together. Could be a good thing of course.


On the other hand with my wet-dry mix rig, distortion got chorused and then reverbed and then mixed back in with dry. I could bang chords that distorted the amp with almost no interference from the effects, and then lighten up and the effects would take over.


There's so many possibilities but with the more complex ones you might need some strategy to make it worth a whole lot. With my parallel distortion boxes, two distortions out of phase produce a radical fuzz, where as a third more "rounds out" the effect more, allowing a sound both more normal and more complex at the same time. A fourth parallel distortion seems like overkill, but may eventually get implemented as a means of adding a choice of more distortion types.


With shameless plugs going around, I shall mention I produce the Subzombie fuzz (for less $$ than .. that other number) and previously the Splonkulator, both parallel or mixing distortions. Subzombie, especially, is a lot different approach than the Disnortion. It can produce sounds that sound mixed if you want, but is more aimed at used the mixing as a means of creating and varying a singular fuzz sound.


Someday maybe someone will set up both a Subzombie and Disnortion in parallel for 5 signal paths, plus some other effects in the outside two parallel paths ... heh.



hehe, then take 4 outputs through 4 delay/modulation setups out to 4 amps. surround sound baby :cool:

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Originally posted by hope is here!

I'm going to get a 2 looper from
www.loooper.com
with the custom option of a series/parallel switch.

I'll run a DD5 and an AD9 into it. The idea being that when delays are in parallel they don't 'hear' each other. This is for running into one amp.



aah i didnt realise that was an option on those, cool! the website isnt working at the moment though and looks like David is quite ill! :( hope he gets better.

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Originally posted by RossCompress

Search Musicians Hotline Magazine...I wrote an article and gave a design to do just that. The results are stunning. Putting things like a chorus and an envelope filter in parallel are mouth watering. You can read about it there and build one!

Thanks!

rk

 

 

ah haa, brilliant thankyou! this is perfect. i cant wait to get my life together so i can experiment properly!

 

effects in parallel seems like such an obvious thing to do to me but it also seems pretty uncommon.

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