hiya,

i was in the studio today, and something odd happened.
my setup was:
danelectro bass (lipstick pickups) -> d.i.: one out to control room, parallel out to -> foxx wah/volume/fuzz -> george dennis wizard blues -> e.h. micro synthesizer -> miked 66 showman reverb amp

now for the oddity...
whenever i turned on the fuzz it would be fuzz in the control room as well!
if you look at my setup above, you see this is not the way the signal is supposed to take.
i took a turbo rat as replacement for the foxx and it didn't give the distortion to the control room; just to my amp as it was supposed to do.

i heard of this problem (fuzz leaks back into d.i.) before, but couldn't solve it on the fly. (didn't pete cornish solve it with a 'magic box'?)

could anyone please explain this to me, and help me work around this phenomenon. or at least hint me in the right direction.

any help is greatly appreciated,
Jan

If you have a boss pedal (some non-true bypass) around maybe the tuner, try putting it between the Foxx and the DI. My hope is that there is a buffer in the boss pedal which will prevent the signal from passing back through the di. The additional pedal need not have the effect active. This is just a shot in the dark, hope it works. If you did have aforementioned tuner, you could also try using it as a splitter put it before the di, run one output to the di, one to the effects chain.

Jan wrote:i was in the studio today, and something odd happened.
my setup was:
danelectro bass (lipstick pickups) -> d.i.: one out to control room, parallel out to -> foxx wah/volume/fuzz -> george dennis wizard blues -> e.h. micro synthesizer -> miked 66 showman reverb amp

What you have here is an un-buffered feedback amplifier in the Fuzz. The fuzz circuit (or more likely the wah circuit following it) has a feedback loop to the input of the device. When signal appears on the output, it also appears on the input in paralell. Possibly at reversed polarity, depending on the circuit.

You need to have an isolation device (amplifier, transformer, big value resistor) in front of that circuit to avoud the signal getting back into your DI. Just changing the sequence of pedals you're already using should work (so the fuzz isn't first), as would putting any active-switch (Boss, DOD) pedal before the fuzz.

The crudeness of early effects pedals is part of the reason they are so distinctive, relative to today's more sophisticated (therefore more predictable) circuits.

thanks that helped a lot!

i placed a boss device (switched off) between the di and the fuzz and gone was the 'leaking' fuzz.

speaking of fuzz, would you really recommend placing the fuzz in a different position than directly after the volume pot of the guitar/bass?
i thought i heard z vex say that one should place the fuzz as first device after the guitar. was he only referring to controlling the level of fuzz via the volume pot of the guitar, or does the load of the coils play a role too?

again, thanks for the advice!

Jan

recording with this method gets the buffer between the bass and the fuzz. which some recommend against.
do you think the change in tone will be significant this way?

i can't come up with a configuration to get the dry bass to two DIs and also to the effects (and then to the amp and he mic), while going into the fuzz without having to go through the buffer, to end up with three channels on the console:

1x di dry bass
1x tube di 'dry' bass
1x miked amp (sennheiser 421)

i have a faint memory of pete cornish inventing a device to get around this problem.

I thought Pete Cornish advised guitarists to use buffers!

surely he did.
sorry for being unexact.

i meant pete invented a device to get around the problem of having a fuzz behaving differently when using a (his) buffer in front of it.

huh. I just read a good amount of his site, and couldn't find anything about providing those older pedals with the right source impedance. I'd be interested in reading about it if you have a link to an article about this problem. I know many people have had problems with older fuzzes, the Fuzz Face for instance, when using them with newer pedals.

Greg

i'm waiting for one of the backliners of HIM to get back from the tour.
he has experiences with this problem.

i think he knows this guy very well:
www.skrydstrup.com

could be that i'm mixing something that he said about pete and steen.
maybe it was steen with the magic box.

i'll post when he arrives.
cheers,
Jan