Pushing My Buttons

In a previous post I mentioned that my Boss RRV-10 was missing some button caps, and I had obtained an RCL-10 to use for, amongst other things, a template to reproduce the missing caps.

The two on the front were missing, as was the one on the back.

Well with a little bit of cussing and cursing I managed to cook up a model in FreeCAD for the buttons, and printed them out on my 3D printer.

I even got the little ridges on the top of the smaller button, though the clear filament makes them a bit hard to see unless you're looking at it in profile.

For scale, this smaller button is about 1cm by 1cm. Ok, it's exactly 1cm by 1cm.

Now unfortunately 3D printers are good at rapid prototyping, not rapid getting it right the first time, and I had some tolerance and fit issues with the first attempt.

The larger buttons at the front were bulging out around the shaft, and the smaller one at the rear wouldn't even go on. On top of all this, the larger buttons were a bit flimsy on the sides due to the thin walls.

Thankfully this was an easy fix, and printing out a new set of buttons didn't take long.

And this time they fit flawlessly, and pushed in and out just like they should.

Both on the front, as you can see, and on the back.

The only shortcoming really is that the colours are very much not correct, but it doesn't bother me particularly much so I'll probably just leave it as is. I really don't want to have to buy two cans of spray paint just to almost-but-not-really match the original colours.

Squishing Sound

Continuing along on my effects journey, I wanted to round out my guitar signal chain with a compressor, and I picked the Boss CP-1X to do the job.

A compressor at its most core level will track the envelope of a signal, its overall volume, and when it exceeds a certain level it will turn down the gain on the signal. This compresses the dynamic range into a smaller dB window, which intuitively seems like it should make it sound like the louder parts get toned down a little.

However, what really happens is that the louder parts no longer dominate the quieter sections, and so in effect the compressor pedal lifts those quieter parts up in (relative) volume. This makes it sound like sustained notes ring out much longer, which can be very helpful if you want something that sounds more smooth and less plucky (which I often do).

But of course it doesn't just make the note tails longer, because as soon as another note gets played the envelope follower triggers the compression circuit to drop the gain again, and so new notes can essentially mute old notes, making sure that the sound doesn't get muddied up with too much happening at once.

This kind of effect works really well at the start of the signal chain, and for right now I'm thinking that this will be a good setup.

The compressor sits at the start of the chain to shape the signal coming straight out of the guitar. This particular compressor also includes an expander function where at very low volumes the compression is reversed and the gain is reduced. This ensures that background noise doesn't get amplified up into annoyingly audible levels when nothing else is playing, which can be an issue with less sophisticated compression effects.

This then gets fed into the Boss OC-5 Octave pedal which I discussed recently. I can bring this in and out depending on whether I want to play some bass lines or just guitar stuff.

Next we have the start of the tone shaping effects with the Boss DC-2w Dimension C chorus pedal. This adds a lot of depth, space and motion to the sound. It can also add stereo width, but I'll likely be running it in mono into the final pedal on the board.

The Zoom MS-50G takes up the final spot, where it will be providing a Reverb <- Amp Sim <- Delay chain. The delay effect gives a sharp echo to the sound, which can help consecutive notes harmonize together. The amp sim effect basically colours the sound in the same way that a number of classic guitar and/or bass amps would. Finally the reverb adds a diffuse echo to open up the soundstage and give the impression that the guitar was recorded in a physical acoustic environment rather than sounding like the raw audio is being poured directly into your ears.

So that's the guitar side of things taken care of, but what about squishing the rest of my sound? Well, it just so happens that I came across a Boss RCL-10 from their Micro Rack series.

This one is set up a little differently from the CP-1X. Rather than having a compressor and expander that work simultaneously, it instead has an overall control that allows you to dial in compression if you turn it in one direction, or expansion if you turn it in the other. It then has a separate noise gate which sharply cuts off the input when the volume drops below a certain level.

In practice one can set up the RCL-10 to act very similarly to the CP-1X by dialling in the main circuit for the desired level of compression and then tuning the noise gate to cut off just before any background noise is picked up.

But that's not the only thing you can do with it. Since the noise gate is separately configurable, you can also do silly tricks like feeding a reverb into it.

This causes the compressor to drag out the reverb trail until it reaches the noise gate threshold, at which point it gets sharply cut off. This was very characteristic of a lot of 80s drum sounds, and once you hear it you'll realize you recognize it in a lot of songs of the era.

Now, did I buy this compressor for that purpose? No. Well, maybe a little bit. I actually bought it because it was a really cheap Micro Rack effect in good condition, and in particular it still had the button caps on the power, effect and, around back, the input gain selector switch.

And I wanted a good example to be able to model and 3d print some replacements for my reverb unit.

Which is, you know, another future project to add to the pile.

If I Had A Nickel For Every Time

I got a few new bits of gear added to the pile recently, and both were half-rack modules, both produced no sound, and both, curiously, suffered from a shorted aluminum electrolytic capacitor which is a very unusual failure mode.

First up, the Boss RRV-10 Reverb. This reverb unit has a delightfully crunchy 12 bit sound to the echo signal which makes it honestly kind of an amazing effect. But it won't do me any good if it's dead, so it needs some fixin'.

Next is the Yamaha FB-01, which is a 4-operator FM sound module. It's mostly notable for the SolBass preset, but it has some other nice sounds in it. Or, at least, it would have other nice sounds if it wasn't just spitting out nothing but hum and noise. So it gets some fixin' too.

You might be wondering why it looks like the FB-01 has a black hole on its surface. The reason is pretty simple: at some point someone decided that it needed to have a sticker, and then at some later point someone decided that it needed to not have a sticker. That latter person scrubbed pretty hard to get the sticker and its residue off, and left a bit of a ring in the paint.

I hit it with some car polish and got it looking a lot better.

The remaining ring is much less visible but still there, and I can't really fully get rid of it without polishing the whole case to a high shine, which would look kind of out-of-place, so I'm leaving it like this.

I did at least take off some grime while I was doing that polish.

So that's a nice bonus.