eric's gear page

Control

The question arose, once I became entrenched in effects: how exactly do I use all of this stuff? There was an awful lot of switching, routing, sweeping, inter-modulating, and splitting that I slowly worked my way into, one piece at a time. A lot of it began as I tried to find the best foot controller I could to do filter sweeps with my Moog filter. A standard expression pedal would have too long a sweep, and not reliably do, for example, a fat drum'n'bass style bass sweep. Because all of the Moog pedals have extensive control voltage (or CV) abilities, I realized that if I could control how much voltage an expression pedal was receiving at its source, it would control the range of the sweep, making it as wide (with more voltage) or narrow (with less) as I wanted... I began to build a number of different voltage controllers and CV performance tools, for use with my Moog, Frostwave, and Electrix gear-- it's such a usable standard, I wish more pedal makers would embrace it.

By the time I was wiring up all of these boxes, mostly for studio pursuits, ubik. was beginning to form, and I had to work around a few problem areas in my live performance-- namely, switching effects and making transitions while playing live. After looking into elaborate patchbay systems, I actually decided that, for the most part, switching the actual pedals led to a more elegant sound than being able to change massive banks of sound with a single click. My switchboxes are almost entirely bypasses for pedals that mess up my signal path and a sort of amplifier-style channel switcher that allows for switching between clean/rhythm/lead distortions... beyond that, I keep it pretty WYSIWYG.

Korg Pitchblack Tuner
Boss FV-500L Volume Pedal
Behringer FCV-100 Volume Pedal/Voltage controller
Boss PSM-5 Line Selector/Power Supply
DOD FX-17 Wah/Volume
Homemade Blue Bypass
Homemade Distortion/Channel Switcher
Homemade Optical CV Controller
Homemade Voltage Source
Bespeco Volume
Morley AB/Y Switch
Zebranalogic CV Source/LFO