FX troubles!!

[erectifier]

Can anyone shed some light on my post in the effects forum?

http://forum.grailtone.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=50366&p=361421#p361421

 

[espboogie123]

Sounds faulty to me. I've never known a reverb pedal to clip the signal. Its a pretty good verb pedal.

 

[anarchy67]

ive got fx probs as well. tried 2 diff pedals 2 rackmount processors. tweaked all the levels and it all sounds like **** with a bunch of feedback. yeah i can turn it all way down and the feedback goes away but we're talking very low volume. im extremely pissed about this

 

[94Tremoverb]

The Mesa FX loop can definitely make pedals clip and can also cause feedback issues.

To fix the clipping you need to set the Send level lower, if the amp has one - if it doesn't, set the channel masters lower and turn up the Output Level. This might not fix it totally though, or give you enough control range to be useful where the 'step' in the MV taper comes in at about 10 o'clock - a friend of mine had this problem with his Rectoverb and a Boss reverb pedal, and I had to mod it to halve the signal level at each Master pot by adding a resistor in series.

The feedback can be caused because the loop is very crude and has no buffer in the 'dry' path, it just goes directly to the mix pot, so signal can get back the other way too, so the FX unit is getting some of its own output back at the input. The only way to fix this is have the loop modded to series.

But if the pedal does the same thing when you run it in front of the amp - and you haven't got some improbably high output pickups or a preamp in your guitar - then the pedal is faulty.

 

[erectifier]

A guy i know at my local guitar shop told me to try lowering the pickup and it worked quite well. I increased the distance between the strings and pickup by ~2mm and that allowed me to go a bit more extreme with the pedal settings and i didnt notice much of a tonal change. It still clips when i hit the strings really hard though - how much more could i lower it without impeding its performance? Its a high-output invader style copy around 15k dc (duncan designed) and in my other guitar its just a stock humbucker but it also sounds pretty high output probably 10-15k. Are there optimal distances to have between your pickups and strings? or at least like a max distance where its too far away?

it makes sense that each guitar is probably different but im just wondering cos i was surprised something as simple as that was overloading an effect down my signal chain

 

[94Tremoverb]

It surprises me too, given that it's a modern pedal - but if backing off the pickup heights has (at least almost) fixed it, it may just have very low headroom. Probably the easiest way to find out would be to take your guitar to a shop that has one and see if it does the same thing. The Invader *is* quite a high output pickup (although not ridiculously so), but if you hit the strings fairly hard you might be just taking it over what the pedal can cope with. I had the same problem with my MXR Phase 90, although that's more known as a low-headroom pedal. I'm using fairly standard 15K bridge pickups too.

I don't think there really is an 'optimal' pickup height, it just depends on your amp, pedals, picking force, string gauge etc - but the Invader does have those stud polepieces so you may find it's more difficult to get it right with it too close.

 

[erectifier]

yeah when i went to the guitarshop i tried it out against the one they had in stock and both pedals sounded the exact same and were fine with a single coil strat so thats when i realised it had to be something in my rig. anyways man thanks for the wisdom ill be aware of these problems in the future for sure! and i was actually looking at the phase 90 for a phaser pedal but maybe ill reconsider