Maxon AD-900

Many people know this classic analog delay, but most people ignore certain interesting facts about this nice pedal.

Some basic facts:

-It requires a 12volt adaptor, wich is important to supply the Panasonic analog BBDelay chips with a current that makes them work properly. This helps the pedal have a nive headroom thats really useful in FX Loops as well as when using it with synths or other line level sources.

-It has a nice buffer that practically does not affect your tone. It's actually nice to have a buffer by the end of your signa chain, where it might be a bit degraded and where you usually put ambience effects like delay.

-It has several internal trimmers that let you adjust your Wet Signal Level and Feedbkack Level (allowing you to creater wilder oscillation fx or taming it) and Delay Time range, wich affects the frequency response of the wet signal. More on this tomorow... ;)

-So here we go: once I read that knowing wich trim pot affected the delay range wasn't irrelevant 'cause you wouldn't never want shorter delay ranges in your delays. That's very narrow minded if you ask me: Turns out that the delay time in analog delays work so when the delay time is shorter the delayed signal contains more high frequencies, has more fidelity. That's a useful piece of knowledge. Even then we must have in account that bucket bridage based delays like this use filtering of the high frequencies prior to the delay circuit. They do so in order to avoid aliasing because BBDelay chips don't manage high frequencies well unless they are set to work very quickly. The faster they work, the less delay time they yield, wich is not cost effective, and we usually love them sounding dark anyway.

Delays like the Maxon 900 are known to be high quality, hence their high prices. This particular delay is a bit dark, so you might want to recover some of your highs in the delay repeats (the original signal remains nice and clear) and you ca do so by crancking the speed of the delay clock.

That's easily done by manipulating the trimmer labeled clock, and most importantly: it wont cause you any trouble!

-You must be very carefull not to touch internal trimmers other than those labelled Clock and Level, wich of course adjusts the wet signal level. That's usefull to crank up a bit the wet signal over the dry, but be carefull it also does encourage oscillation to happen earlier. Incidentally this delay is usually set so auto-oscillation is hard to achieve.

-And that's how you expand the functionality of your Maxon AD-900 AND any analog delay that has labelled internal trimmers (if they are not labelled you can always surf the internet and find out).

;)

MI Audio Crunch Box

Sheer Fun in little space.

I wanted to praise an recommend this pedal in the very first entry of this blog as it worths every single penny of the very reasonable prices it can be had second hand.

Here's some things you need to know about it:


-It "transforms" a clean amp with its Marshall-esque sound with quality and authority.

-It has more lows than the average OD/distorion pedal, great for single coils.

-The first editions can be had for prices around 70/80€, wich is a very fair price for this beast.

-It probably wont do ultra-doom metal, but with the gain set at 9 o'clock it gives a very nice tone for hard rock, so it has plenty distortion on tap, go figure.

-Not too noisy for this kind of pedal, not dead silent either.

-It can accept voltages up to, at least, 18 volts wich provides  more headroom and probably better frequency response:

that's not really a necessity with electric guitars, BUT it's handy with SYNTHS and other line level instruments that tend to overdrive the input of regular guitar pedals and choke things too much.

-True bypass.

-It does not clean that well when you roll off your guitar volume pot, it loses highs. I find it cool because it gives you a darker and cleaner version of the Marshall tone, kinda Cream era Clapton sound. But it's not super-transparent in that regard (as a Tweed Deluxe amps tend to be, for instance).