I’ve had some good fun running the mix output of some Digitakt drums through a Moog MF Drive. Crunches up nicely, the filter is obviously very playable with trebly hi hats and snares and such and you get a one knob EQ to balance things out a little. CVing the filter cutoff is also obviously some nice rabbithole to get lost in if you’re into that.
Bitcrushers can also give you some real dirty crunch, sometimes even some vocal (?) type of sound if you push it far. I’ve only ever done that in software though to treat samples and loops, but I’m sure there are some cool pedals out there as well.
For me, there is nothing better than waveshaping to add meat and movement to drums. I use the Virus TI2’s various waveshaping algorithms on as much percussive material as possible, but you could get a pedal that does this. Not sure which would be good for this sort of sound mind you.
Not very expansive and awesome I suggest the Special Cranker. It’s good in the not too much department but can easily go well crunchy and keep your bass present.
I’ve done a demo of it here if you want to check:
Didn’t know about this - sounds great - the downwards pitch shifting makes it pretty special.
I have an Empress Multidrive and really like it. fuzz, distortion and overdrive, hi pass and low pass per effect, then a global eq of sorts. Plus a couple of alternative circuits for moar! Setting very low overdrive or distortion, then turning up the global volume it works as a nice characterful preamp for guitar and synths going into soundcard. And of course great as a send fx on a mixer for saturating drums without losing low end. Not the cheapest but way cheaper than a Heat - even if you buy 2 if you really need stereo overdrive / distortion / fuzz saturation.
Totally. A little old character mixer with a pedal on a send. Cheap and flexible. I do this with various combinations of Boss BX/KM mixers and dirt pedals. Gives you the most control over the sound and allows you to keep the low end.
If you look around for a couple of hundred dollars you can still find a Boss SE-70. Mid 90’s era, it is half rack size, can be midi controlled. Analog overdrive/distortion and a full suite of BOSS (roland) fx including a vocoder.
The mid 90’s Prodigy sound from songs like SMBU (among others) is a combination of SE-70 reverb and overdrive…
But not to be overlooked it is a small box with all of the BOSS pedals inside with a combination of digital algo’s and analog fx. Not the best fx in the world but lots of really good fx (still usable today & with that 90’s era sound), good especially for the money and if you like that 90’s sound.
Being older they also don’t depreciate when you buy them. They are over the hump & the price is stable or slowly rising.
Buy it for a good price in good nic, you might not even lose money if you sell it in a few months time or maybe only be down postage.
Just look for one with the terminals in good shape if you do get one and a psu or have checked out your local psu options beforehand. The plug is not common. One of mine came from Japan the other the US.
Last week in the “current sounds” thread, I posted some experimenting that I was doing with the distortion effects in the Boss SE-70, and got some good feedback.
Since then, I found a bunch of old threads covering this topic, so instead of spamming more experiments in the “current sounds” thread, why not necro an old thread, but more on topic.
I was surprised as anything that the SE-70 was adding latency to the sound, so I could only use the distortion as an insert rather than send. Even the algorithm that had split the dry/wet channel had internal phasing. The distortion is supposed to be analog, so I assumed latency wouldn’t be an issue, but
For my personal taste, I’m not a fan of blowing out the kick. Just not a fan of that “BOUWM” sound. But I still like a decent “thud”.
I have a Boss BX-600, which does sound great, but it’s hard to tame the BOUWM that happens.
So I ordered a bunch of cheap pedals from Amazon. I didn’t want to invest in some higher priced pedals not knowing what kind of distortion/OD sounds better. Fun experiment for sure.
The pedals worked just fine as a send, and I didn’t get any phasing/combing, at least to my ears.
On all of the below, there are four channels from the TR-8: kick, snare/clap, toms/rim, hats. Each of these has about a 5-15% send level. Then the return channel is mixed in at around 25%. The FX is EQ’d, with a slight low increase, slight cut at 125, and highs of 8k+ boosted.
Here’s a dry loop, then two loops of the Dark Mouse (Rat) pedal:
Here’s a dry loop, then a loop of the Joyo Baatsin T. OD and T808:
Here’s a dry loop, then the Joyo Baatsin Crunchy, Rioter, and OCDrive:
I also got tried the Joyo Tiny Huge Fuzz and Extreme Metal pedals. Those just blew the sound out, which was fun, but nothing I couldn’t already do as an insert with the SE-70.
I’ve ordered a cheap Mosky d250x pedal that should arrive in two weeks or so.
Overall, fun. I was surprised at how well the Baatsin worked out. It was an impulse choice with everything else in the cart.
If anyone has any suggestions on fiddling with this more, I’d love to hear!
The Elektron Analog Drive is great for this. I bought one for guitar and ended up not liking it as much as some other pedals I have but I started running drum machines and synths through it and it’s great for that. Lots of different flavors to explore and they can be picked up pretty cheap sometimes.
The se70 has a nice distortion / vocoder preset that I’ve used in the past … popular on some lfo tracks ‘back in the day ‘ … there’s a nice sizzle on drums and bass sounds though I’ve only pre-processed things … don’t remember latency issues
If just focusing on price, I see the Analog Drive pop up for $3-400 CAD at times. So far, I’m at 12 different types of od/distortion for $150 CAD. I can’t compare them to the Drive though, since I never used one.
The SE-70 is amazing. I love mine, and have used it for all kinds of effects, including the vocoder for dub techno and the 20 multi-tap delay for chaos.
Maybe my unit is just wonky. But I’ll still keep it around for effects where a little latency is fine.
This may or may not interest you from the perspective of the actual process that I used and if I did it again today I might use some different gear to fine tune the process, however I do think that it’s sort of in line with your current testing so I’ll link this just in case it might give you any ideas for your experiment.
I didn’t even process that we’re in the same topic where I made that original post otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to link it. I just used the search bar to find the specific post and then used the back function to return to the bottom of the page here. Totally ignored the thread title. Oops
