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Patrick

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What's up guys?
I have a 3 channel Dual Recto. All my pedals sound great going through the effects
loop except my two EVH pedals, (a Flanger and a Phaser) The volume drops tremendously when I turn those on while in the loop. I took them out of the loop and plugged them into the front and they sound
much better. But now I have a little hum. Anybody have these pedals and experiencing the same thing?
Thanks,
Patrick
 
The loop wants to see a line level signal which the pedals do not provide. Most pedals don't behave well in a loop. Hum might be a group loop. Are you using batteries or are both pedals on the same power supply.
 
Patrick said:
I have all my pedals plugged in to a power strip. No batteries.

That's your problem. Get some 9Vs and the hum goes right away.
 
If you don't want to bother with batteries, a proper power supply, such as the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power will do the trick aswell.

Eric
 
Once you get rid of the hum by either going with batteries or a buffered power supply, put those pedals back into the loop where they belong. They will sound 100% better than in front of your amp's preamp distortion. When you run a modulating effect such as flanger, phaser or chorus in front of your amp's preamp distortion, the amp will add harmonic distortion to the secondary (flanged, phased or chorused) signal and will generate square-wave distortion artifacts in your sound. This will come out sounding like distorted warbling and/or white noise, neither of which sounds good if you're interested in better guitar tone.
 
Chris McKinley said:
Once you get rid of the hum by either going with batteries or a buffered power supply, put those pedals back into the loop where they belong. They will sound 100% better than in front of your amp's preamp distortion. When you run a modulating effect such as flanger, phaser or chorus in front of your amp's preamp distortion, the amp will add harmonic distortion to the secondary (flanged, phased or chorused) signal and will generate square-wave distortion artifacts in your sound. This will come out sounding like distorted warbling and/or white noise, neither of which sounds good if you're interested in better guitar tone.

So what about those people who use older amps that don't have loops.....I have always ran pedals in front of the amp. Chorus, flange , Delay you name it. I save the loop for rack gear like eq and noise gates.
 
i use my MXRs (zw-44, evh phaser, evh flanger, dyna comp) in front of my amps and i love how they sound this way.
that´s just how they should sound to me.
for the power supply, i use the T-Rex fueltank junior which works great the the MXRs. 5 isolated 9V outlets, so you can combine two of them to power the 18V flanger pedal.
in the early days of my rig, i used a so called "power-bank" supply and it doesn´t has the isolated outlets and guess what - my MXRs produced a lot of hummmmm.
for delays, pitchshifting, chorus and reverb, i use a g-major in the fx-loop of the amp.
 
R_ADKINS80,

RE: "So what about those people who use older amps that don't have loops.....I have always ran pedals in front of the amp.". So what about them? They have had to either deal with the distortion artifact noises or do without modulation effects live, which is what most of them did in the days before loops. Those modulation effects which show up on recordings from that era were almost invariably placed there not only after the amp's distortion, but also after the mic'ed speaker as well.

Regardless of what one resorts to doing, or even of what one prefers doing, it doesn't change the fact that placing modulation effects in front of the amp's distortion causes square-wave distortion artifact noise. If one actually prefers that noise, there's nothing stopping them from using it.
 
Chris McKinley said:
If one actually prefers that noise, there's nothing stopping them from using it.

Yeah, it sounds so terrible when that EVH guy puts them there.
 
Silverwulf,

Your unwarranted sarcasm aside, it should be noted that Mr. Van Halen's live rig is not quite as simple as guitar>flanger>amp (Bob Bradshaw, anyone?), so to imply that that is how he does it is a bit misleading.

Further, it is simply a matter of going down to your local GC or whatever and testing it out, A/B style. It will be irritatingly apparent that any modulation effect placed before an amp's distortion will produce the aforementioned artifacts, whereas the same placed in the loop, or anywhere after the distortion, will not.

Now, again, if someone actually prefers that sound, there's nothing stopping them from using it. However, it still doesn't change the fact that the pedals were designed by their manufacturers to be placed after the amp's distortion section and to sound their best when placed there. Pedals were never designed to be completely interchangeable anywhere in the signal path.
 
Chris McKinley said:
Silverwulf,

Your unwarranted sarcasm aside, it should be noted that Mr. Van Halen's live rig is not quite as simple as guitar>flanger>amp (Bob Bradshaw, anyone?), so to imply that that is how he does it is a bit misleading.

First off, I'm sarcastic, get used to it. Second of all, EVH didn't exactly call up Bob Bradshaw back in the 70's and ask him to make a rig for him. Yes, plugging a Phase 90 into the front of the amp was an integral part of EVH's tone, which is heralded as one of the - if not the - best and most emulated rock tones in history.

Chris McKinley said:
Now, again, if someone actually prefers that sound...

And again, I'd say that's the majority of people in general since you won't find many that say EVH has bad tone.
 
So I put a 9V battery in my EVH Phaser and took all the other pedals out and although the hum is gone there was still a considerable amount of drop off in volume when plugged through the effects loop. I think I'll run my reverb and delay through the loop and my EVH Flanger and Phaser through the front. It just sounds more natural that way to me. I'll get it right some day.
 
Patrick,

What is your loop's send level knob set to? That may (or may not) be responsible for your volume drop-off. BTW, you'll want to place your delay before your reverb in the loop, just FYI.

Generally speaking, here's a general guideline for effects placement:

guitar > wah/overdrive/EQ (secondary location) > amp's preamp > send > EQ (primary location) > modulation effects (chorus, flanger, phaser) > delay effects (echo, delay) > reverb > return

That will give you a basic idea of what goes where. If you truly prefer something else, go for it. But at least try out that format just to get a feel for what the pedal manufacturer's, studio engineers and most pro guitarists usually go with. Hope that helps.
 
When I had my EVH phaser, I used it out front to get a more authentic Van Halen tone, be it right or wrong. Now that I have TC Electronic rack effects, my phaser, chorus, delay, etc... are all in the loop and the pedal has been sold. Go with what your ears like :D .
 
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