Hey man, so I listened to some Lossy videos and feel like it is definitely possible to squeeze some of these tones out of the 404mkii.
Try running your effects in series and run the reverb into the cassette sim on Bus Effects 1 and 2 and then into the Super Filter on Bus 3 and Lo Fi effect on Bus 4, and start dialing in various amounts, and don’t be shy about extreme settings (like 0 and 100 time on the reverb)
I started out thinking the big reverb on Ha-Dou with mod all the way down would be the way to go, but the crappy regular reverb on the MKII seems like it may be a better choice especially if you try extreme settings. I like the Ambience one for this application.
Anyway, still a work in progress but getting ballpark at least. Some good type Sonic Youth sounds to be found.
No time to record tonight, but give that effects chain a go. When I get a chance I’ll try to record something. I got lost in playing, some pretty haunting sounds in there. At a setting of 100 time and 100 level, the ambient reverb starts to feedback on itself but never goes into full self oscillation. With the Super Filter on Bus 3 you can filter out some of the harshness, and for the final Lo Fi in the chain, I like the balance somewhere around where it is in the photo below, but all the different Lo Fi settings add a different vibe, so worth experimenting. Negative tone settings are good too. The Ambient reverb setting at 0 time and 100 level is good as well with that chain.
I hear you. I’ve lived in a van a couple times in my life. Thought I was going to end up that way again a few months ago. Although, living in a van almost seems luxurious with the cost of vans going up these last few years.
That’s what you get when you buy the cheapest vehicle on the lot!
It sat for so long it had bees nest in it. I took it for test drive and there was fucking hornets dive bombing me. I knew right then this one is for me!
Nice one. I’ll try the bit crusher as well. For the Super Filter, I like to turn the whole second page of parameters off so it doesn’t do the envelope follower thing, and then you can shape the sound with either the low pass or bandpass filter (low pass is usually more my thing). I use a filter pedal like that on my pedal board as well. More as an EQ for like a “cocked wah” effect.
@Kegeratorz is right, this going to work thing sucks. I’d rather be at home playing guitar through my 404 than standing on a train platform in the rain.
Others are probably doing this already, but one neat 404mkii trick I discovered in this latest project (for the tune starting at around 2:40 in particular) is, if you are working with a stereo sample, copy it to two pads and set one to “mono left” and one to “mono right”. If you are lucky like I was with this sample, the left and right channels will be different enough in interesting ways that you can create an A section and a B section with the same samples. In this case, the engineer had the wet reverb all the way on the right in the mix and more of the synth sound, so for the B section of the song (from around 3:33) it sounds like I filtered everything out, but really it’s just the way the original song was mixed.
I almost always work with mono samples, since stereo can feel too messy to me with so much going on in the mix (and it wasn’t an option for most of the hardware samplers I’ve used to date), so this was kind of lucky find and I’ll definitely be mining both the left and right sides of stereo samples more in the future.
I have a Dr Scientist Dusk pedal that has a fixed envelope mode like this, although it’s a low pass filter. I bought it thinking I’d use it as an autowah, but it turns out that the fixed envelope mode has become an essential part of my sound. It never leaves the board although I only use that one setting. It sounds so good and with the resonance knob you can really accent certain harmonics. Filtering out some of the high-end content makes the sound feel old.
Long day at work, but I figured I should post something with the settings I was using yesterday before I forget them.
This is sort of the direction I was thinking for “Lossy-ish” tones. This is basically just right out of skip back and just me noodling, so you could do a lot cooler stuff if you put time and effort into it. With those four effects I mentioned above there are so many parameters you can tweak so you can go in all sorts of directions, much glitchier or darker or whatever you like. There are 9 different LoFi settings so loads of variations to choose from. I just went for the first thing I thought I might use in a tune (the only Lossy stuff I liked in the videos I’ve seen is the reverb stuff). I’m not big on the whole pitch shifter thing, but the 404mkii can do that as well if that’s your bag.
