YOU KNOW WHAT GRINDS MY GEARS - gear rants

[DarkAxel]

This thread is for ranting about stuff you own, use and love but sometimes drives you mad
i'll start... YOU KNOW WHAT GRINDS MY GEARS?!

A) My Faye Sing... there are times when i'm like "i don't know, i need something more funky, this ain't really doing it" but then I ALWAYS FIND SOME UNIQUE SOUND I ABSOLUTELY LOVE SO I STILL KEEP THIS 200 BUCKS ON-THE-FENCE PHASER ON MY BOARD like... it sounds really unique into my Heliotrope... and it does the best superslow psychedelic phasing i've heard

B) My GODDAMN DIGITECH PDS 20/20... the switches are weird and too close, so at times you turn both on in he middle of a show and all of a sudden there's loud oscillating flanger feedback siren ruining your shit... the potentiometers suck and make it extremely hard to find some exact settings for the delay, which i NEED... the blend only knows about three positions, the same thing applies for the feedback... and there's audio bleed...

But it's the best flanger i've ever heard, it can do super weird stuff, the modulation on the delay is divine, it can do stutters and glitches, drones, weird vibratos and it basically replaces about 3 different pedals - and i have no idea HOW i'd achieve some sounds with anything else

[psychedelicrelic]

My Boss SE-70. It's a mini-rack unit. It's crazy digital and you can hear digiartifacts all over most settings. But it does really weird shit that I know I couldn't recreate with anything else. The scroll knob is right next to the exit button so sometimes when I'm dialing settings, I hit it. The reverb gets overloaded easily and creates a unique distortion but I really just want plain reverb most of the time and its my only unit for it at the moment. Editing can get tedious to find that sweet spot but when I do, I'm overjoyed. A lot of the time I save a setting and come back to it in a day and it doesn't sound the same. The volume knob is weird. It's one stacked on another and adds weird compression on certain settings and im always messing with it to find the sweet spot(which is probably why my saved settings never sound right) I'm always thinking about selling it but I know I'll miss it. I use it on everything, keys, guitar, vocals, drum machines...everything. And it "sucks tone" according to friends which I can hear but it's not bad or good to me. I love it as much as I hate it.

[Tendollarcat]

My EBS Valvedrive is several things I hate in a pedal. It's big - in a stupid board space stealing way. It's awkward to power - it's 12VAC @ 500ma. And I've recently discovered its got a weird design to it that may make it susceptible to breaking down on me. It turns out it uses a voltage converter to drive signal upwards to some ludicrous degree. On tour a couple of months back, I'd been using my Valvedrive to completely mess with an SVT2 that was provided as backline. It's sounded awesome - as it often does. The problem was - it was a cheap arsed tour and we couldn't afford to fly with boards so we just took essential pedals loose. Sure enough, last show of the night the Valvedrive just died. Turns out this fancy transformer blew. EBS are fucking awesome and are sending a replacement part to my repair guy.

Here's the thing - I don't want a pedal that takes up shitloads of space and blows up on me. But it is hands down the best dirt pedal I have used. It works in every venue, on every amp, with every piece of backline I have used. I even asked our resident etching guru Dan about a rehouse and it turns out the circuitry is just that big. So it can't get smaller, it probably can't get more reliable and I can find anything that works better for me. I want to clone it, shrink it and have it encased in a shock mount box. I'm so hooked I'm considering adding a second to my board and just running a couple of tiny pedals in between. In fact, I'm going to try the Carl Martin Bassdrive next - just to see if it does anything cool with this general design. It goes without saying - the Valvedrive will be a fixture on my board forever though.

[coldbrightsunlight]

The flanger hoax can make some of the most beautiful sounds I've ever heard and it's ridiculously versatile and I love it, but I hate that it's so complicated that I'm sure when I go to change the settings that I'll never find THIS sound again. Never has here been a pedal that needs presets more than that one. Also it's huge. It's staying as a studio box because of what it does but there's no way I could ever use it live unless I was doing synth/noise and could tweak while I played.

[Jwar]

Faye Sing pissed me off too but for different reason. You make such an awesome pedal like that, and then make stupid power requirements. There has to be be a way to fix that. It was so fucking annoying to me that I couldn't give the pedal a chance. I wasn't willing to find a proper power supply. Hence the flip.

[skullservant]

I love my Big Green Big Muff, but damnit does it suck tone.

[rustywire]

-Any effect in an enclosure wider than a Boss compact pedal, with side-mounted jacks.
Currently using a Surf Rider Deluxe. It's a solid 9/10. Would be 10/10 if everything were top-mounted...
Stomp Under Foot 1976 Ram's Head special edition; same story.

That aside they excel and are appreciated. Cant think of any other complaints with either one.

-The fact that I suck at wah or prefer other sounds/gear that just wont play well with my use of wah.
Signs point to the former because a FoxRox fuzz-friendly retrofit couldn't fix my problems.

Nevertheless, when I hear killer results elsewhere I get GAS to use one:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WTITJ7L0GA[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgTJtdn6VjM[/youtube]

And when I cant get it to sound good it goes back on the shelf/trading block.

[Ghost Hip]

Dude... Duress. The fact he can wah and use his whammy bar at the same time still impresses me. I want a wah strictly for copping Swervedriver and Swirlies tones but I can't justify their giant enclosures. I need to take a look at those mini wahs I've been seeing.

I love my Supernatural reverb but the factory velcro that came with it is so fucking strong it takes a screw driver to crow bar it off my pedal board. I re-arrange my board weekly since I don't have a solid band, GIMME A BREAK.

[bigchiefbc]

Oh man, I've got a few:

First and foremost: There's something wrong with my Digitech XP-1000. Intermittently, it just crashes and stops passing signal. All you have to do to fix it is pull the power and plug it back it, and then it works fine. The only person I know of who could fix it would be Adam from GuitarGeek (who modded it in the first place), but he's almost impossible to get ahold of. Digitech obviously wouldn't touch it, since it's modded. But the Space Station modes are seriously the coolest thing I've ever played with. I simply couldn't ever do without it. So I just deal with it, and keep it in a bypass loop in case it shits itself mid-song.

EHX Frequency Analyzer: by far my favorite ring mod of all time, but 40V supply WHATTHEFUCKBALLS! I even tried building a boost regulator to run it off a 9V supply, but I haven't worked out the bugs yet, so I still need to run it off the stupid wall wart

EHX Bass Micro Synth: absolute essential pedal for me, never found any other pedal that can do what it does (especially the filter section), but shitty 24V supply that uses up two of my power supply outlets, and most of all, it has a volume drop that absolutely kills me. I'm still trying to figure out what to do about the volume drop. I've always wondered if I could install a clean boost inside the damn thing.

[misterstomach]

I love my Big Green Big Muff, but damnit does it suck tone.

i felt the same way about my civil war muff. you can really hear a difference. then i spent $30 for a kit for a single tb loop and the problem was solved. the tb loop is great too if you want to stack dirt and be able to turn them on and off with one stomp. particularly helpful when stacking with a russian muff 'cause those things are so huge it's impossible to hit it and another pedal at once.

[JuJo]

Currently using a Surf Rider Deluxe. It's a solid 9/10. Would be 10/10 if everything were top-mounted...

I have an old style Surf RIder and this makes me rage every time I put it on my board. It always ends out kicking off another pedal that I love, so I got a Ghost Echo. I still try to jam the Surf Rider on my board every time I rearrange, but now it kicks itself off instead of another pedal.

[skullservant]

I love my Big Green Big Muff, but damnit does it suck tone.

i felt the same way about my civil war muff. you can really hear a difference. then i spent $30 for a kit for a single tb loop and the problem was solved. the tb loop is great too if you want to stack dirt and be able to turn them on and off with one stomp. particularly helpful when stacking with a russian muff 'cause those things are so huge it's impossible to hit it and another pedal at once.

Yeah, I've been meaning to make one with the spare parts I've got around the shop, but I just never end up doing it for some reason and my board is tight as shit right now. Might try to squeeze it into a 1590 lipstick enclosure horizontally so I can put it in between rows or something

[GardenoftheDead]

-Way Huge Swollen Pickle: If you're not at speaker level with it, it's all muddy and flubby in the low-end spectrum. Also, the filter knob is barely even there if the internal controls aren't at their factory setting.

-Boss BF-2: Sometimes barely audible after the drive section, but too noisy before it.

-Dunlop Volume Pedal: Fucking enormous.

-Fulltone OCD: Doesn't stack with amp drive without being earbleedingly bright, even on settings that are dull and lifeless into a clean amp.

-Boss FZ-2: It's just too much most of the time.

-Devi Ever pedals and Z.Vex Fuzz Factory: Just plain don't work with my EMG-strat.

-Boss DS-1 and MT-2: Just fuck everything about them.

So that means my Dirge pedals, Carbon Copy, Nova Repeater, Bukowski 2-in-1 and Phase 90 are the only pedals I have no complaints about.

[backwardsvoyager]

First and foremost: There's something wrong with my Digitech XP-1000. Intermittently, it just crashes and stops passing signal. All you have to do to fix it is pull the power and plug it back it, and then it works fine. The only person I know of who could fix it would be Adam from GuitarGeek (who modded it in the first place), but he's almost impossible to get ahold of. Digitech obviously wouldn't touch it, since it's modded. But the Space Station modes are seriously the coolest thing I've ever played with. I simply couldn't ever do without it. So I just deal with it, and keep it in a bypass loop in case it shits itself mid-song.

This happens to me too but not often, although sometimes I turn it on and it's ridiculously noisy, then turn it off and on and again and it's fine
How the hell have digitech not reissued the space station, they'd make millions
I couldn't live without it though, if I wanted to replicate the sounds using other pedals there would be nearly a whole board worth of expensive stuff and even then it wouldn't quite be the same

Also, pedals with footswitches too close to the knobs (in particular my subdecay baby quasar). It's impossible to turn it on quickly without kicking the knobs

[Astricii]

My Moog RingMod. I love it but it's huge and won't fit on my board. that being said, My board kind of pisses me off. I have an MKS pedal pad which is great for protecting my shit and easily setting up for playing but the pedal to weight ratio is kind of bumming me out. Not that I really need that many pedals in my current band. but it is kinda lame to not have the option of putting my larger pedals on it.

My flanger hoax for the same reasons other's have mentioned. it's the craziest noise maker and unique flanger i've ever seen but damn it huge.