Impulses and Pedal boards

[paladin shredder]

i got this idea when rehearsing with my band. the other guitarist uses a pod xt and doesn't own an amp. when we play live he goes right into the pa system. the pod's speaker emulation is not to great.

so i though, wouldn't it be cool to have some type of pedal board or di box where you can actually load your own impulses into it? i know there are speaker emulation di boxes, those have been around a while. but with impulses being relatively new technology, i figure a company would have done something like this by now.

i have no idea is a product like this exists, so if someone knows of a hardware product where you can load your own .wav impulses into it, i'd like to know. and if something like this doesn't exist, there's quite a few smart entrepreneurs on this forum, and i'm to lazy to figure out what it would take to build. probably quite a bit of computer programing knowledge. or maybe it would involve hacking some type of digital multieffects pedal, since some of them do have usb and firewire ports now.

 

[006]

One immediate solution is a Muse Receptor with any impulse VST loaded...but that's like $2k, that and I'm not sure if you can load your own impulses into it to use or they have to be the stock ones...so in that case RevMKIII would be better in that situation. Also at that price point why not just get an AxeFX...yanno?

I thought there was a pedal that did this already that someone mentioned a while back. Maybe they will chime in again.

~006

 

[DominikJW]

Yeah I thought about the Receptor too, but I dunno how it would work for You dude.

Anyway, Rev mkIII in a pedalboard... That would be fukking nice, ain't it? I wonder why Peavey isn't really thinking about this, I would sell my XTlive in less than half a second to buy it!

 

[Metaltastic]

AFAIK the cheapest options out there, dunno about quality

http://www.smproaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=73

 

[006]

Whoah Marcus those things are fucking amazing...

Tiny Terror or Krank Rev Jr. one of those for RevMKIII... haha

I still don't know about loading your own impulses and using them in it, but I saw a portion of one of the videos they showed the screen on the Mac with the GUI for that box and it they are then playing through Amplitube. Very interesting.

~006

 

[Ermz]

http://www.smproaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=73

Shit, just realized it was already posted.

Well anyhow these units let you load all your VSTs in, which is fantastic. You can use your head and impulses, or straight up all digital... studio-quality effects. All there. Pretty sweet!

 

[kaomao]

I hoppe that if you can host the presets on that v-pedal you can host impulses as well, if not it's useless.

 

[noarin]

would have been even better if they had a normal jack input and 1 or 2 XLR outputs..

 

[kaomao]

.... cheap ...... lol
check this video : http://www.sonicstate.com/news/shownews.cfm?newsid=6283

399 euro for the mini rack thing (this is cheap)
1299 euro for the pedal (this is not)

 

[Ermz]

would have been even better if they had a normal jack input and 1 or 2 XLR outputs..

Connections *

• 2 Mic / line inputs (combo)

• 1 MIDI input

• 2 TRS outputs

• 1 MIDI output

• 2 XLR outputs

Where's the issue?

Only problem I can see is needing to run your own DI to impedance match, but you'd be wanting to do that anyway, given how crap on-board DI's commonly are.

 

[midget donkeys]

I hadn't heard of this V-pedal, it must be new. It sounds interesting.

As for just a straight up affordable impulse playing rack unit, I looked into building a design and prototype of such a thing about a year ago. I am a mechanical engineer and my brother and his wife both have PHD's in electrical engineering. There jobs are both in digital signal processing video devices, but that invloves alot of the same stuff. So it was actually possible that I could pull an impulse hardware unit off.

I eventually gave up on the design. What made me give up was hearing some great clips of Palmers rack mount speaker simulator. I found that I could not keep the price of components down for my impulse concept device to cost less than Palmers unit.

Which seems to be the problem with the cost issue of somehting such as the Receptor. Its just too damn costly for guitar players and it is overkill in the processing department if all you want is to run impulses. I don't think you will see a cost effective stand alone hardware unit for impules only any time soon. I think it is much more possible that some one like peavey will come out with a digital amp that also runs impulses.

 

[noarin]

sorry about that, I only read the V-machine one; I see the V-pedal has exactly what I'd need.

 

[drew_drummer]

To be honest, he could easily get rid of the Pod, and get a couple of Blackstar pedals. One of them at least has built in cab modelling, which would probably sound a lot better than the Pod's.

 

[paladin shredder]

i guess since my friend is pretty cheap (and pretty much set on his pod's "tone") the speaker simulation boxes would be the best bet.

the v-pedal looks amazing though, i'd like to get that for myself. just load revalver into it with some of guitar hacks impulses, and go play a show!

 

[Ermz]

Yeah I'd personally grab a Triaxis, run it into the V-pedal, and be in tone-consistency bliss. Same sound from show to show... no chance for the engineer to screw your tone with bad mic placement (just bad EQ). All your favourite studio FX in the form of plug-ins. Altiverb and Halls of Fame for verb, Lexicon delay etc.. You'd hope the latency is low though!

The rack version would be amazing for mixing live gigs. Gates, comps, verb, delay on every channel you need em on. Can set up your presets at home then just recall on the fly... amazing.

 

[Metaltastic]

I can't ever imagine myself playing live without a cab, though - I'd just need that guaranteed personal monitoring...

 

[Ermz]

Just buy a headphone amp and run it from the V-pedal unit to yourself via in-ears! You could keep this stuff in a single rack and have it all patched, ready to go. Cabs only serve to fuck stage sound, given the phasing between them and the FOH system, as well as being largely non-linear, so the poor bastards in the front could be taking a huge amount of fizz or harshness and you'd never know it.

 

[006]

I'm looking at this from another perspective. To me it's most useful function, besides the pedal version which would rock for live shows using MKIII and custom impulses, would be the rack version using it much like a Duende or PowerCore, etc. It has an ethernet hookup so you can use it as a DSP host. But you can load any VST into it and not just ones specific to that unit. I have been wanting to get a PowerCore, UAD or similar for a while now but my main problem has been that I am restricted to using only the ones made for that device. While the plugs may be great, and I have tried some of the UAD stuff on a friend's rig with much pleasure , I would like to be able to utilize the power of the unit to use other plugs as well.

If you are, in fact, able to load any impulse into the MKIII module on the pedal version then that is a definite alternative to the POD or AxeFX for live use, for me anyway. Despite the cost, if it works as advertised, it seems worth it if that's the route someone wanted to take. I like Ermin's take on it about using it for a FOH situation using all software compression, verb, delay, eq, etc. within a single rack unit...that's pretty fucking awesome. Makes things a lot more simple, plus you wouldn't be limited to the Behringer outboard that most venues are rollin on.

~006

 

[Ronixis]

I think using a simple laptop set up with a decent soundcard would do. Wouldn't be that HEAVY METAL now would it.

 

[cobhc]

If I can get hold of the V-Pedal cheap enough, I could see myself using one in the fx loop of my amp, and using it for all my guitar effects. Or indeed running it into the poweramp, to utilize the preamps of Revalver into a tube poweramp and real cab.