LIVE: Why Did Universal Audio Release Guitar Pedals? (w/ James Santiago, Tore Mogensen & Josh Smith)

[Music] they know how to find the link i wouldn't worry about it love that it's off but the tom roll is [Music] like [Music] probably not the smartest time to change something on my pedalboard i have a different fuzz i was going to try last minute but it's that's the classic yeah it's yeah what is that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey everybody it's wednesday we have not done a live in three weeks and we're here doing a live so really excited today is one giant episode of petal world news we're going to cover the january 27th reveal of if we go down to the pedalboard cam the universal audio pedals we have the golden the starlight the astra and uh we're doing something today that's a little crazy it is uh we have rigged zoom into i don't know it's gonna be a train wreck it's gonna be fun uh we have some special guests two of our guests are across some videos that were pre-recorded rick beato youtube legend i don't even know what to say what do you say about nick talk about rick rick rick is the boss he transcends all things yeah okay then we have andy timmons it's andy timmons what do you say annie timmons uh let's pull up the zoom here on the zoom call we have there they are there's josh smith everybody right there with his signature administ guitar no no small deal congratulations on that by the way i think they're all muted on your guys's ends y'all muted yourselves you got to unmute now sorry and here's the thing yeah this is going to be a very video podcast vibe low pressure something's gonna fall apart and we're gonna have a good time and if you're watching just know that this is not uh something's gonna happen weird we have tor on the bottom here bottom left how are you i'm really good thanks exciting you may know the great tour from tc um and you've made some moves and you're with ua how long you've been with ua now uh just a little over two years a little over roughly the time it took to make those pedals there i i my my longest my oldest memory with you is when i told the entire world i was making a product called the seesaw which is a volume pedal with a tuner and we were gonna do the tc tuner in it and then the world melted down and there's still no sea salt yeah so jhs fans just appreciate that's a piece of history then we have james santiago james i just need you to tell people where the crap you come from and some of the stuff you've done because it's incredible we had a phone call one time oh yeah i think we talked for like seven hours and every other sin inside of your mouth was like yeah like we that's when we invented that thing and then my friend and i had this idea and he did this thing and it was like all the secrets of guitar unraveled in your story yeah uh that that's it's the hardest thing to explain because uh there's this stuff people know about and then all the secret stuff nobody knows right now that now you know about um which we'll we're gonna do one day when the world's normal we're gonna come over and do uh we're gonna prowl through your stuff and tell stories but today how did you end up with the ua like what's the deal here oh okay so i'll give you the unedited version of that is um i previous to coming to ua uh i have one of my best friends in the world this guy named josh fighting another jay so many we had too many josh's today um and i was just talking to him one time and i at the time i was at line six still this is probably 20 years ago or something is this pre george this is post george strips this is actually let's go over there me and tripps left line six roughly around the same time okay so the the deep story is one day he walks into my office going dude i'm bailing i looked at him like crap okay i guess it's time to go no no disrespect to our live sex buddies but it's like when your other friends are like oh i'm like i'm joining this other band dude it's like oh but that's my drummer and i kind of you know it's a bummer but so that was 2005 or six and i went to work with my old buddy josh fine and voodoo lab who i'd done some stuff with before a thing called the sparkle drive way before that yeah just a little bit i just want to pause here this is this is what will happen the more he talks he'll be like this little thing you know and then yeah yeah it was just a weird thing i'm like hey can you make this he's like yeah why not that's not literal you know that's how things get done you call your friend and you know how to make this yeah i'll make you one and then there's uh everyone has them that's the reality of this business um but so that that happened and i was having a great time with josh doing the lab stuff and then just consulting for digital products on the side until uh a couple of friends were at ua they're like dude you should come work for us some of those products such as the uh the pro tools what's it called um well i did i did work on eleven it was a plugin and i did all the the preset sound design for the actual hardware the orange thing so i'll get all of that stuff on the side of voodoo lab because i told with voodoo lab it was we were analog pedals and power supplies and rack systems yeah and i said i i literally said i'm never doing digital again i'm done with digital but i left line six but then ua it's like but what if we gave you all these stanford engineers and you could make anything you want to the best quality you could ever make it and i'm like okay now that sounds fun and i get to do something creative and different because i i think for me it was i wouldn't go back and do it unless we could push forward with something that yeah nobody so your first work with ua was a little project called the oxbox right oh ex you were absolutely right that was the ox they're like we have this idea it's a very unknown yeah just kind of it sounds super boutique like dude we sold like four of them like i'm lucky i still have a gig after that disaster honestly yeah it's a horrible design yeah dude and you want the the real truth of that is they're like do you think we're going to sell these i'm like dude i don't think so i don't think anyone's going to buy this but we're going to make it and i'm going to do the best job i can and do some crazy stuff and yeah so that's literally like yeah and then josh how do you get roped in i mean how are you roped into the zoom today like well i mean we go okay we go way back morgan amp tasting this was like nam 20 oh i remember i was like a baby i didn't and you're and i remember i met you and knew joe pretty well i was the first second dealer of morgan amps in the country i had a guitar store that failed miserably we don't talk about that but i remember playing your guitar and you had like 17 gauge strings and my hands were bleeding or something yeah that was like 20 11 12 i don't know but that's how i know you first of all so how do you get wrangled into this well james is one of my best friends and kind of like my neighbor i could walk to james house okay and you know tor i've known for a long time through tc of course and i was super psyched when he moved over to universal audio because i feel like tor and james have created like a super crazy mad scientist guitar department but james is like my ultimate nerd buddy yeah you know james is the guy i go down the street to you know really really tweak out over batteries or cables and tubes and pedals is is my man you know main guy that i rely on because i feel like he has the best ears of anybody i know and he kind of cares about this stuff more than anybody i know yeah is that good or bad i can't tell anymore okay it's all good yeah it's kind of like uh like an avengers thing forming here is what it feels like yeah avengers are i it kind of feels more like a super friends kind of thing i think super super yeah you know the reality is it's more like like group buddy therapy because it's usually like man i really want this one guitar and it sounds so good have you tried one of these and it's it's seriously like consoling ourselves off the ledge of spending all their money buying something we probably shouldn't yeah cause i i blame josh for a couple of guitars because it would be like dude get over my house pick me up we're going to norms and then i come home with something that means i may get divorced if i'm not careful yeah well that's happened a couple times and i apologize for that so that that's that's our setup and that's why you all are here so let's break down what's going to happen we're going to give away like we do every week a box of ernie ball strings ernie ball trivia time we'll do that at some point we also have a couple uh hercules stands hercules sent us a bunch of stuff we're going to pass it on we have a three-way guitar stand yep uh let's ask that question now and get it over with for them so the winner of this take away all right you're gonna be able to put three more guitars in your home which will make you happier so it's scientifically proven or based on what these guys just said maybe not it doesn't matter okay it doesn't matter what they just said all right so all right what's the question all right here's here's our question uh first one in the chat to answer the question right gets it um this is a hercules brand stand so the question is what year was the disney movie hercules released disney go yeah that's right the first answer to hit our server we'll get that and that's all we'll say and then josh you just let us know so let's let's start with uh let's start with the astra i guess i guess my generic question let me ask this to james and to tour what motivated ua to do these so that's what i want to hear like universal audio i remember releasing the 500 units that i did the 500 modules at like the same time that the interfaces kind of hit the market and like you guys have owned pro audio in such a prolific way with the way you just the way you've done pro audio in the interfaces the plugins the hardware it's been revolutionary and so now you chose pedal so why is that tell us about it i think it's i think it's very much the same reason that you just mentioned about the the interfaces and the plugins we really wanted to inspire musicians by creating some pedals that were just so sonically authentic that you know it would be beyond belief really um and you know there's a lot of great pedals out there already but we really felt like with the you know with the know-how and and the technical expertise that ua has that we could create something that just took you know this sort of idea of emulating classic vintage gear to a whole other level yeah yeah on your angle james like what do you feel like inspired you know your work in this you know what uh i hate to say it was well you sometimes you're never supposed to reference what you love because how many times do you make a pedal or sound you go i'm not sure i like that but somebody will and you take a chance but a lot of the stuff in these pedals were things i know i wanted as a small little pedal on my board so it was about echoplexes and memory mans and spring reverbs so my thought was they're gonna give me a bunch of phds from stanford and they're gonna rip apart ecoplexes with me for six months i thought that was fun that's literally my answer it's like we're gonna tear these things apart and we're gonna we sat on the couch one day me and turn like what if we could model the entire ep3 and multiple e3s from the input jack the preamp the tape formulation the splices on the tape and just go to town on that and and somebody actually gave us a green light said go do it so that that's insanity and i want to state his from a historical perspective i have i've been working on i stopped working on it because i had to do other stuff i'm gonna finish a line six bio and marcus ryle in that whole team now i did i want to say like 12 hours of phone calls across six employees i ask you some stuff oh yeah yeah and one of the things that's prolific about what you're doing it's part of an evolution so invention is always an evolution and dsp dsp was around in the 80s but by the time we get to the 90s a little better you have zoom you have roland you have the toshiba chipset but marcus ryle takes the line six approach and he says okay i remember talking on the phone and this was so captivating he said we don't have the tech to perfectly copy say an echoplex but i can take with my team which was george tripps and just countless other people angela mazzolco terry a lot of a lot of great mentors like brilliant minds and go what's the things we like like the glancing out of painting what did we notice like at that level and the deal for october 99 is it's revolutionary it like blows the brains out i mean it's incredible but now here we are 21 years later and you guys are working with technology that actually let you like you told me you literally sat there and replicated different cassette tapes oh that's the nerdiest thing i've ever heard marcus rowell couldn't do that well and i'm going to give marcus some credit because right around that same period imagine my first time meeting marcus was them through george tripp she's like you should come meet marcus this was 22 years ago yeah i got to line six and i'm sitting in a minivan with marcus ryle he's like you should come work here i'm like will you tell me how you do the modeling he's like well you kind of you work here and i'll tell you you'll see it yeah that's funny what's funny you bring let's start with the starlight um i see starlight yeah yeah we have let's give away this standard we got to give it away let's get away come on joshua is over here you'll never see him he is a an invisible force in the room who's going to announce the winner yeah uh chris pickering you have won who the wes pickering west pickering the hercules you wanted west pickering email vlog at jhs pedals if you're not west don't email us because that's mean email all right let's start with the starlight yeah i'm gonna say this and walk away and we have a wonderful video from andy too we can get into i have never ever ever heard a memory man so perfectly perfect absolutely and i i'm really okay i'm in a room right now with we we're doing it's like three to four thousand pedals whatever i have every version of the memory man i have i play them all know i'm inside now and it's just like it's just no one ever does it you know there's just the thing where it's like that's good yeah it's a it's a dark delay when it warbles a little that's like what you get but this one is wild like there's the way that the decay falls the way it attacks in the way the modulation comes off the it's perfect so it's the modulation for me the modulation oh yeah yeah yeah so let's talk about this starlight because i'm yeah i'm already excited uh dude i can i can tell you right off the bat if we want to just go deep into it uh the re the room you're sitting is very similar to what my mind feels like when we start a project is i have to go back and re-reference all the original hardware so uh the before you start a project you should always go back and go well let's go find four five six seven great vintage examples because as you know even if you found one who's to say that's even a good sounding one so a lot of the work comes from that i have some vintage ones that sound horrible oh they don't yeah the uk i think i bought all the different buckets of reticon panasonic ones ones that didn't have the vibrato with the squelch thing in the back the blue ones so i just went had my own stash and then went thankfully they're like i need to do an r d purchase so i was just getting extra memory mats and then you spent a few months literally shooting out and i think what happens is you can get away with one repeat sounding like a delay it's that 6th 7th 8th 10th 12th repeat where a lot of things fall away you can't maintain that unless you model the whole circuit so that's was a lot of the magic that and then that vibrato circuit man if you don't do that right it's like why bother doing it that's the make or break like addison and i both i plugged it up that day and i was like that's it it's the vibrato circuit it's the vibrato circuit yeah so how do you do this do you do it at a component level do you do what are you doing that's so different yeah a lot of stuff it happens to comply it's component level stuff we look at and that thing has a compender in it there's a bunch of weird stuff in that so you're not grabbing like you're not in a software engine it's like grab the delay block and slide it over and then okay that goes no no no okay oh god i wish it was that easy but the insanity of the phone calls are like like dude i i don't know man i don't think there's enough capacitance on the impedance modeling of that input because it's not distorting right and the third harmonic isn't poking through it when you get to a point where you're at that sorry no i this is beautiful because people need people need to know invent you know invention is an evolution and i want to go back to that you guys are capable of doing what no one's done with the team resources and right and the tech the thing is even if we had found this out with a team of at line six and they'd gone there you couldn't do that and put it in a pedal at that period so the fact it would have been impossible so the fact that for us like one of the main things for us is this crazy what we call the uafx engine it's this dual processing four core arm processor that we maxed out to do these one effect because as you know half the stuff that we hear has nothing to do with the repeat of the delay it has to do with the guitar goes in it gets actually all these harmonics come in from the non-linear distortion circuit just getting to the delay line and then there's this weird clock sample thing because as you know the vibrato steals time away from your actual delay time it starts to steal these weird the buckets start sharing and and you have if you don't do the circuit model from top to bottom you're just modulating a delay line with the tone control down uh that that's not a memory man that you have to have the whole thing so i think another another interesting thing here is that you know it's sort of it's a combination of of a number of things so having the having the expertise the engineers to actually pull this off having james's ridiculous years has just also said to you know go into a rabbit hole so deep that you wouldn't believe he's like 90 years old yeah and then the last thing is also the fact that whenever we do these things whenever you know the engineers actually create these models they create them on super powerful computers and classically earlier what you do is you create like a slim down version of the model and then you would actually have to scale that down even further to fit whatever processor you had to put it on but nowadays we we make the entire thing as perfect as can be you know every single component and then we actually are able now with the processors we you know we can put in these pedals to actually put them in exactly the way they were designed to be we don't have to make any compromises to actually you know take them from like a you know a fast real laptop or you know a desktop computer and then put them into the yeah it's the full thing so let to lay out a parallel so people can understand me coming from my perspective it's like some of my favorite delays ever and i love them but like the dd20 boss you know the the do4 even i have a flashback on my board now uh people are like you play a flashback i like the flashback but what's happening there tori you're saying there's a scaling down from you go from a point of creation and you scale you funnel down to a resource that you can handle on the board so what we're actually seeing or what you're seeing is that these are actual computers to some extent like what we've known as processing power these pedals are actually computers yeah cool yeah it's um uh it's not the most fun word to say but it's called an embedded system it's the same thing with auxes it's actually an island that has its own processing that it has to run in this entire environment and that's mostly to get all the harmonic distortion right they get the latency as low as possible or else it doesn't feel good anymore i this is incredible how do we what do we want to do here josh you want a place you want to you want to jam on the you got all three over there i have uh i have the golden and the starlight hooked up not the astra yeah how do we want to demo let's do some like singular demos and then we're going to try this psychotic jam over zoom which is going to burn to the ground um who wants the demo you call it james whoever all right james you do the memory man okay i'll do the remember because i have two up in fact do you want to see that i have a really janky pedal board to my right yeah i can go to that video show it all this is a reveal this is cribs jhs chris here we go here we go let's see if it works okay you're flexing so hard you got two of each you got a vintage fuzz face it's a yeah and i i will tell you so so here's the thing these are in mono in front of the guitar amp okay uh so it's just standard getting gritty a little bit and then these come back and then go into a stereo system so you can hear these sort of in post so so i thought it's for it's my test board so i hear things usually into what's the paper pedal oh where uh oh this is helio oh man okay oh i'm sorry so i got really into actually you did a whole thing on tube driven pedals yeah i used some of yours yeah so so here that's actually a handmade new nos part it's a real high gain tube circuit and a pedal from here it looked like a sheet of paper laying over her pedal i got you now it's um yeah yeah i'll let you here for a second but uh yeah let's [Music] uh i got a friend named charlie hunter and he had a two print from this guy he makes these crazy leslie torn apart into like head cases yeah and he he makes this crazy vintage tube boost so it's literally like a stage of an amp and a pedal so sorry uh i sorry i didn't think about that not being a normal sort of sorry production thing yeah um a great pedal to god kneel over at that paleo tank yeah jump into the memory man it's a memorandum let's go here [Music] so the memory man i'm going to run it modern in front of the amp print off the modulation so one of the interesting things about the memory man is that clock swinging and the fact that h repeat kind of gets distorted compressed and garbled on the way down which almost turns it into like a reverb the longer you make those feedbacks yeah [Music] i want to also give the disclaimer we're doing this over zoom it actually sounds amazing there may be moments where it gates right you're you're stuck it sounds great that's it so that it even has the crispies like the up high thing yeah there's a thing in fact i'll tell you how that happened this time or i'll switch uh actually i'll show you the rest because you're right what's happening is it keeps getting fed back into the analog circuit so it gets more distorted more compressed more crappy each repeat that goes by and then we turn on the vibrato [Music] that's what a memory man does that's what a memorial does yeah time it has to move the whole pitch of the clock the sample rate i've never i have never played every digital recreation that does that simple thing it's such a nuance but it's like so fun that you're doing that with the knob oh dude you have to because if you're doing all of those [Music] yeah that's so cool how about you guys jam with i'm just not even going to play guitar i'm going to sit here how about okay you guys start up a jam and uh okay let's see i want to say this this may be the world's this is the first ever jhs zoom jam zoom jam it's gonna it's we're gonna see what happens okay so and i should thank you for having me because i'll likely be fired from the band after this i haven't been fired yet so i think it's gonna be fun you actually played eric johnson cliffs of dover on guitar hero right uh you're yes i did that's i i am actually the guitar hero guy just the fact there so you're not a bad guitar player i just want to throw that out come on oh here we go what what key what key james okay um don't tell me don't tell me what key oh okay perfect i'm just gonna pick a key all right i'm gonna have at it now i'm gonna give us something with some space so we can hear those trails all right okay all right [Music] hey [Applause] [Music] this is like some brian eno jam that never made it onto a movie [Music] soundtrack [Music] so one two three it yeah the audience loves it the it just it it like you hit the arpeggios the high notes just like glisten off perfectly yeah let me play this video from andy that he sent in where he's talking about yeah is that that cool we're just we're just making this up as we go and then that worked yeah we did that that's sort of i think awesome it's to be determined in the comments right oh yeah that's right all right let's uh this is andy timmons so andy is just sharing he couldn't make it because he has a birthday or that's something i think i think it's his wife's birthday actually yeah so that's a scene yeah that's a husband's don't ever do don't pedal podcast over your wife's birthday birthday thanks andy timmons for life lessons hey josh james andy here thanks um i is [Music] so there's i don't a nice the way they kind of kind of trail away without the specifics but also the dialing individual [Music] modulation echo it's fine it's all an experiment yeah it's all right so could you guys hear that on your end sounded good on mine yeah yeah sounded great it's an experiment if you're on the channel and in the comments i i heard there was possibly some looping yeah andy's just saying it's super volatile he used to tour with two memory men and that's like a nightmare i always think about the edge like unforgettable fire era i still don't know how they did that like i can't imagine like pride in the name of love setting up i don't want to think about it so that's what he's saying anyway yeah so hopefully that was clear a little jar bold or something but so out of that what's the next thing you went after let's talk about the tape echoes i guess yeah we can go tape echo um unless you have more memory man talk uh but we could talk memory man for probably an hour just historically of why they're cool and yeah honestly that it's like there's this little overdrive circuit feeding a delay with the stuff and um and maybe it's just me but i always felt like i always had that little red light was always clipping no matter where i put the yeah it always distorted a little bit and um i i think there's something to that and it's even more on the echoplex where we always say well this great clean sound a lot of great clean sounds are have this component of overdrive and clipping and distortion and a signal and that's what makes it sound sort of organic and the echoplex is one of those weird ones that if you don't model the the head hitting the tape with the compression and all the the saturation points it just sounds too polite um and again in that one it's like well you can get a couple of repeats to sound good but can you get it to sound good when you're doing that wall of noise and doing the whole path thing and you hear the tape drop out and um you know what i should shut up and play yeah so you specifically the ep-1 is a tube echo ep 2 is kind of an oddball but it's their solid state yeah and then you went after the three which is if we see this that's like jimmy page use that on his theremin we see that's the one that always comes to mind or yeah the three is like known that's awesome unit yeah uh and the weird thing with threes is yeah and i think for rock guitar you get to yeah paige you get the van halen one all of that early stuff uh eric johnson's stuff they're all these these preamps which and we can bust a couple of myths about the preamp right now let's do it uh um i think there's a misconception that there's an actual preamp with a volume control on there the preamp is what it is and what i found in most of the echo plugs i had is they actually took gain away it never failed that just going to the echoplex she probably lost a db and a half or a db um but it had this nice mid-range and no top end there's just no end when you go yeah we've seen a massive trend to some extent i don't know if a trend is a heavier hammer but it's like you know echo preamp pedal right and so i think what people are just wanting to say what what should be said is just like the color of the sound of the tape echo when it's not echoing and i can show you that too because yeah i think the misconception oh you can hear the echoplex preamp hitting the marshalls like oh it's not there's no hitting the marshall it's actually attenuating it a bit but it's the tone coloration of the preamp and all and i can actually let's see if it actually shows up over zoom i have yeah on mine you said uh you put a little sticky note the it colorized uh coloration in true bypass mode that sounds like that you actually programmed this one specifically i did program because the later on there'll be an ios app where you can go well let me have an analog dry and then blend it in so you don't have the color yeah um i sent yours in full emulation and that's what i have uh down here so if i just turn the mix all the way off and turn the pedal off and turn it on it just makes it fatter and kind of better on the high end so so i'm going to put a setting that completely shows why echoplex [Music] is i'd have to be on the right model wouldn't i because i'm playing what does that sound like a memory man sorry there we go oh that's eric johnson right there that's like you can you hear that live awesome city there's this little yeah that's exactly the sound though yeah eric johnson what is that song you guys know he would he would start live there's a couple tracks he would always start live like that oh yeah like that this stuff in here yeah and here's another one when you you hear this little pinginess of the note and it's starting to turn into this fluffy little cloud and then the tape's wobbling and you're gonna drop out and you start hearing things like you just said fluffy little cloud on a live stream yeah he's little cars it's beautiful that's the splice there's a splice and then you also hear the pitch pull and there's a clickiness and and to go there for the ep3 nerds there's the a mode in here is a version of the ep3 that if you ripped them open you'd find this little board sitting in there so there was a little actual compressor circuit on the dry guitar printing to the tape head so that meant while your your cord was okay had a certain sound but was coming back and delay actually had a percussive clack to it at the top of each repeat wow so that's the that's the police and his thomas tone it's a little bit of that yeah and it's and you wonder why it's like well why is it hazardous percussive thing but then it's getting played back to the tape head compressed again so if you hold the cord it's almost like you're holding the compressor and these notes start to recover back this is insane stuff and this actually was a week of r d with a one of the dsp guys so if i hold the cord [Music] hear that i don't know if you can hear that but there's a little hoo you start to get resonant notes in the delay path so there's no i've never heard any machine or any pedal replicate the machines weird quirks of those resonating sort of saturated things it's just it's we can go talk about that one of the more notable things so i'll say two things here one is i love tape delays i have tons they just break constantly like it's a nightmare i just want to say like i'm excited that you can have something that's really accurate that doesn't break every 10 minutes the other thing is when you're holding out the long repeats so it has the added fl we use the word flutter that's been the popular term it's ever slightly more every repeat and then it keeps it it almost like disengages more at the end and this one's doing it which is something i don't hear um i just don't hear it in some in major tape delay pedals nowadays no and i'll tell you what two minutes a little bit but it feels a little too predictable it's like like yeah it's doing it but yours almost feels like there's a little bit of a randomicity to the ending i'll tell you exactly what the machines do and this is done i hope i'm not doing everybody else's homework which i don't care at this point uh a memory i'm sorry man echoplex there's two things there's the actual you know when you look at the cartridge it always has that kind of there's always a honk hunk so that that actually is a consistent wobble that happens every so often with one revolution of the tape but there's two things happening so you've got that which is just the general wow of the tape speed and the cartridge going to revolution plus an actual randomness of that thing getting stuck through the cap stand into everything else so you have a consistent thing plus a oh this thing happened it feels very random it is it's completely random so you imagine we wrote stuff to figure out how random is it so i actually know the pitched uh swing of the two sections into so that's when i put the mod control at noon here that is a match to the original hardware wow so you can either pull that back or exaggerate it and exaggerate it means i'm sure how many times have you plugged in an echoplex and it just sounds like a tape course because it's it's just slipping through them because mine are all broke that's they're all bro they're all broken and they last an hour before they start going south so that was one thing was to i'm actually matching multiple states of the ecoplex across the mod knob as well as three different machines on the a b and c because this is going to go deeper than anyone would want to know the a machine is the cleanest machine i have was a new old stock machine i bought from a jazz jumper guy who never used it um so i kept it that way the bee machine is the neck this with this one back here that had been played a bit with a worn tape and i did not clean the heads or the rollers i let it be kind of worn in for a few months okay and then and measured that one and the c one is literally um as the tape gets sort of loses its sort of stickiness uh anyone ever seen the thing if you turn the echo plex on the tape start shooting out the side it won't pack right yeah that's that right before it unpacks i had to keep a pencil to repack the machine with the tape so i could do some measurements because i wanted it to be the tape that was literally on his deathbed this is like evil villain level detail but it's great and i will tell you that that they all rep all three of these versions here with the monitor they all sound a little bit different and one of the coolest things too is um i'll make this worse is we talked about actually what marcus said is what are the things that that you can pull from something that makes something sound like what it does yeah uh and then we also have a thing uh not to say i want we improve anything but there's ways you can fix things we don't add the noise until you need it to get the feedback to sound correct because there's that whole tape feedback that be creates its own cloud thing so when you only have one or two or three repeats i'm not going to bombard you with the tape hits and noise i kind of tame it down a little bit so it's usable yeah otherwise if i turn this up you're gonna hear the same ground come from the transformer and the tape is per each cartridge so that this thing that so you digitally recreated ground hum from a transformer yeah so you hit a note [Music] that's so crazy yeah it's really over the top and i really got away with murder josh josh you live near you live near james you should check on him a little more often i know i i i think it's funny because these things is hearing him go down these rabbits i love it i love it i i love seeing him do this stuff and i i just like listening to him talk about it i learned oh it's it's contagious like it's the deep level tor you were saying something i just wanted to say you know james mentioning that he got away with murder i think the interesting thing was that when we started this project it was like yeah so we have this cool echoplex uh plugin on the uad platform let's use that and james and i went no let's look at that and then at the end of the day we totally really did it and i mean i i guess you guys from hearing james talk about it you guys can imagine how long that took and i can't believe we got literally got away with spending that much time doing this how much time did it take to plex just throw it out there how much time oh god um there's what i told them i spent the time on it's bad when you tell your work this is how long i spent and then there's the work you do on the weekends and at night um uh uh it was probably from start to finish off and on a year i would say a good year just on the echoplex yeah because the thing is what you do is an iteration process so you you get something to listen and you're like nah the wow is not right it's not distorting enough the 17th repeat after you let something i don't like the way that you literally dissect each repeat to make sure it's there wow and then you go okay can you fix this and then you go work on something else for a couple of days and then you you and i'm sure josh you're probably the same way if you're working on multiple pedals there may be all running concurrently with different engineers or different production lines yeah so you realize like you hunt and peck something for a couple of years if you're not careful easily you know yeah so let's we're going to try to truck along there's so much gas i know something i'm killing your time this is wonderful let's quickly what is the precision break that down what's the precision delay precision and and uh actually tour do you want to say because i he might have a better i'm actually curious for for tourists great explanation because oh yeah but i can i can do that i think you know if you know for all of these pedals what we really tried to do was give you know for each pedal basically offer three classic effect styles so for starlight it's you know obviously a tape echo it's a bucket brigade echo and then the last one is a digital echo and we were sort of looking at different things that we you know potentially could could emulate um we have the uh sd 3000 in you know in uad land already but that sort of colors the tone and we felt like we needed something you know the echoplex and the memory man colors the tone pretty heavily and we felt we needed something that was like pristine yeah for the guys who just want like the perfect beautiful lush no coloration sort of digital echo that's the one we wanted for that and we actually have that algorithm in two places already obviously we tweaked it quite a bit for for the pedal but there is a uav plug-in called precision delay and actually it's also a version of that algorithm that's running in aux so all the delays that you get in aux is sort of based on that same on that same algorithm yeah that's uh yeah it's it's the three delays you need yeah and that's cool let you wanna let's jump over to golden gonna do that keep trucking yeah all right so golden what what do we want to do here how do we want to jump into how do you approach reverbs 20 20 21 you release a reverb pedal yeah so what do you do i think the first thing that we really talked about with with that i mean was getting a spring reverb to sound like a real spring and you know no disrespect to anybody out there who's done you know spring rehab style pedals in the past a lot i've i've done a few and i don't think there's any pedal that really nails that sound to the point where you a b them and go like yeah that's a spring and it feels right sometimes i either they sound sort of artificial and a lot of times they have this almost a tendency to sound exaggerated it's like you know too much of that kind of boink and whatever you do that's just the thing that sort of takes over the sound so that was like the first thing it's like you know can we actually make a spring reverb where you can you know you can fool somebody into thinking that it's a real springtime with the marcus rile thought of the broad stroke what makes spring spring what has what's been lacking in your opinions in a pedal oh boy that's a that's a tough one uh because i'm sure i'm putting a good 75 percent of these folks to sleep with the nerdy stuff and that's how we finally apologize now go over for it yeah yeah you know there's multiple components to this a spring reverb when you when you really dissect them there's that there's that initial sort of hit and smash of the king and then you get the actual it sounds like a reverb tail and then there's this sort of oceanic stuff that rumbles through a tank so i always listen to three components how is it when i first hit it with a cord what's the actual perceived reverb tail and then all of this actual stuff that trails because the real spring tank even though you may only hear one or two seconds of it if you were to look at it listen it's probably five six seconds of it just sort of trailing off and rumbling so the that sort of initial like drip thing has to be a combination of all three of those things working together and that also comes from uh tearing apart every spring tank i personally owned we bought more vintage tanks i borrowed tanks we put them in the lab and we listen to everyone because i think there's a lot of different uses for spring and somebody's perfect spring for one use isn't the perfect spring for somebody else so we ended up back in a yeah and a three-stage abc switch again of a beautiful mid 60s blackface era deluxe reaver acutronics tank that just sounded great for everything and then finding another one that had more of a smoother attack and then another one that was this weird tank we found that had the most ambient spring resonating tones i never heard um and and so i i hope that within that and also playing with the eq and i'll just go it even step further it's not just the tank we had to model the tubes around the tank too um yeah as if you if you think about it uh you if you just listen to a tank it's one thing it's another thing to say the the signal coming in also gets compressed and these harmonics were coming from the tube driven tank and then recovering so we tried to make it simple well we got the best tank model ever and i listened to it was like god this is so boring we need we need the whole tooth so we almost had to do an entire tube amp model just to make the tube sound correct yes spring reverb i think in a lot of minds it's like oh that's simple that's the older reverb you know lauren's hammond made that for him and organs it's so simple and then you get into it and they don't decay quite right or they're glitchy or whatever it's really interesting so josh you're a spring reverb man up there in the corner like tell us about this like tell us what you think about this reverb like compared to all the stuff you've played and how it feels yeah i mean i'm a spring reverb junkie definitely if there's one effect i can't live without it would be spring reverb you know and i'm lucky i have a lot of great amps that have tremendous spring reverb i have my vintage super reverbs and other fenders i have my morgan amps where you know one of them joe has a outboard three knob reverb tank built into it my signature one has the volume uh reverb and dwell so i love the verb you know i have a vintage brown fender tank i have a benson reverb unit i have the reverb in my space echo i have a freaking plate reverb in my studio i just love reverb you know so this pedal literally james had been preparing me for it over the months because he knows how into spring reverb i am and i'm always kind of wary i've had ones over the years that i'll use when i'm traveling with backline because you know it's a it's always 50 50 if the the house reverb will work in a backline amp but normally my amps have great reverbs so i don't rely on spring reverb pedals because they just don't cut it the second i plugged this thing in and started going through the three models of spring i i called james immediately and i was like dude i cannot believe how good you got this together and it really is kind of insane like here's the first one i'm gonna turn off my bite [Music] yeah i would absolutely just think you're playing old fender amp or something now now i have a question if you kick if you kick the pedal does it explode into spring reverb it does it does it does see it does now that's a feature i i want to see maybe v2 where it's like some kind of motion earthquake detection you know technology where you can just kick that thing as hard as you can and it just splatters like crazy oh dude you i will tell you there was an early prototype we had that if you if you put on your pedalboard it actually would crash and i'll i actually have a test for that there's a test i would do to listen to the in the springs you take your guitar pick watch and you just make a percussive thing you go whoa that definitely drips that drips that that's it and that's the test because a real tank has this splatter yeah it's not the same when you hit it but you have to go [Music] wow and that had to be the same thing on the pedal as and i pulled the real amps at the tanks i put back into and i had a last abc test before we locked it down wow that's literally a test it's a drop test and a splash test why don't josh why don't we try a jam a zoom jam ooh all right let's see what happens you wanna you wanna chord progression or anything tell the guys i'm not gonna play again you don't no today's my day off today's the day off i don't have to touch a guitar i'm going to go to the second plate which is the the more silver face yeah that's kind of my favorite i mean second spring you like it smooth that's the smoother one yeah yeah second blade reaver second smooth cool are we jamming we're i guess we're going to jam josh what key you want all of them all of them all of them all the all right so so giant steps at 290 bpm ready hey now cool okay i'll i will just start something okay [Music] so [Music] so [Music] bye [Music] done [Music] so [Music] that's that's [Applause] can i just say real quick josh it's it's a privilege to get to play with you my goodness never in a million years would i ever think that i'd get to play with you anyways back to pedals now yeah it's it's real spring reverb in a tiny box well what's crazy is even as i was just playing right now in the most uncomfortable can't hear you guys i had no idea if i'm in time setting as i was listening to the tone it was like i could not tell at all that that's not the reverb from my morgan which it normally would be in that sound you know what i mean right now it's i just absolutely i can't tell like it sounds really great yeah so yeah i think that jam pretty much speaks for the spring reverb it's pretty good i've been yeah there's there's a lot to say there so we have the spring the plate so plate reverbs uh somebody give james explain to plate reverb i would but you can do it better i think you're muted oh yeah james you're muted oh i said the answer already sorry and i think josh actually has a plate reverb in his studio um and you have a real plate he has a real plate and they are huge they take up a wall it's a charge it's a headboard to my guest bedrooms that's right in this that's that's steli so you have to imagine these long metallic plates that are the size of a room and they're extremely expensive and that's it's a little different because at the time you had plates and then you had what would if you're talking about capital you'd have a a room dedicated to a chamber kind of thing so you those are the two kind of classics next to spring so for the plate the crazy thing about a plate is it just has this beautiful smooth musical kind of uh flow to it so when you're doing acoustic guitars vocalist love plates are smooth and nice or i'm not giving i'm giving you the musical explanation because yeah like with spring you have the sound is reverberating through the fake space of a spring yeah and it's got this attack and crash there with a plate you're reverberating through a large piece of thin steel and it's smooth and it doesn't have this all these weird artifacts of the spring or the real kind of things you get in a room yeah so and if you look up things if um look up emt 140 and our ua engineers i spent a lot of time working on plate rear ribs so the fact that we were able to leverage the the decade plus of them doing this kind of work and getting to sort of reimagine it in the guitar space in a single pedal um it's kind of cool because and i think tor i see he spec this thing knew that what are the three classic verbs is you really have to have a great spring for smoother stuff you have a plate and then who doesn't love actual digital reverb in the classic late 70s early 80s so i i think for us to to be able to try to hit all three of those in authentic fashion was great i still didn't give you a great answer for the plate no that i think it's just realizing spring is a physical spring yeah you know hammond leo fender puts it out in 61 because of dickdell and you already have this plate thing going on in the studios and then you have chambers like capital les paul digs these holes under the parking lot and you have all that stuff so yeah uh that the reverb pedal is incredible let's do ernie ball trivia time and jump into the astra is that cool yeah we do that all right let's do that [Music] ernie ball you guys are awesome thanks for giving away a box of strings if you get the answer right to this question you get to email me and ernie ball's going to send you a whole box of strings of your channel what i like is the voice is out of sync and it's really funny it's funny today it's like uh-oh oh you can't tell over there because you're behind the mic you didn't have time to do the sink nor brush my hair back over to that my hair however fresh cut ernie ball trivia time here comes a question first one um that we see on our side to get this right uh josh was going to pick a winner for us so here goes this lord of fuzz plays with three full stacks around him what is his name go oh and we'll be back with the answer here in just a few we'll be back let's dive into the astra uh i talk about modulation for a second so i have so many i feel like a mad scientist here with all my hey josh a quick question nick yeah nick's here by the way you know i know i'm i'm just sitting back you're lounging i'm just lounging in my sweats just chilling i got a burning question do you have the box for any of these i actually do i do i have it right here it's amazing [Music] i love how horrible that was wow let's see here so modulation machine again i just i'm excited to hear the approaches here um one good question we have three of these units uh which one came first what was the design evolution what did you start with what did you end with and specifically how did the modulation machine fit into that in terms of the which pedals yeah like when you had the thought at some point was like let's do pedals so what'd you start with yeah so the first one we started with was the delay because well everybody loves delay um and then very quickly after that came the reverb and then the last one on the on the agenda was uh was astra um and that really came about because you know i was sort of going through the the uad library of plugins i just started at ua at that point and i you know i got an interface and i got all these free plugins and i'm like you know trying out all these things i'm like oh my god these sound amazing they sound you know way better than you know any sort of emulation of modulation effects i've ever tried and the first one that sort of spoke to me because i'm a you know i'm a metal guy was the old the old blue mxr wreck flantas yes because dimebag daryl used to use that thing to make his uh his rhythm sound way way bigger live and in the studio and i'm like oh my god i can get that sound now i tried to get that for a long time and it's like we gotta we gotta make a modulation pedal um as well well let's start there how about you pull out your really subtle guitar and maybe demonstrate [Laughter] and and while you're getting uh set up here we do have a winner yeah yeah ernie baltimore the answer and the winner yeah so the last answer to the last trivia question by the way i always forget i'm sorry it was nineteen ninety seven first year that hercules came out disney dropped a bomb on the industry with hercules that they did all right so the answer to this is uh jay massix or sorry maskus uh dinosaur jr would have been acceptable but joshua we've got a winner who is it yeah the winner is matt hamer matt hamer congratulations look i know i do know matt hammond i think i know that matt hamer matt do you know josh give us a thumbs up in the chat send me an email vlog jhspedals.com back to you tour all right tour yeah break down this sound that that you that you love let's break down that sound and jump into yeah so it's kind of a subtle thing i mean now we've had james and you know go through crazy brian you know soundscapes with the with the memory man and we've had just played you know beautifully with the spring reel this is more of the idea is basically to widen the sound so classically if you do metal rhythms in the studio you'll you know you double or even quadruple the sound but in a live scenario you know obviously you can't do that so what you want to do is do something that fans up the sound without making it sound like chorus and stuff like that so this is just so this is just a rhythm sound hope you guys can hear this totally bone dry and mono [Music] so what i've done is i basically i did a little nowhere near james research but i did a little research on how dimebag daryl actually set up his uh his rack flanger and i basically took those settings and put into astra and this is what it sounds like [Music] so this is without it again yeah and with it [Music] it's the kind of thing where you know once you start playing with it and you take it off it's like ah it's just you know you feel something's lacking yeah this so the astra has we have the chorus brigade flangers trim phase it has more sounds than the others yeah so when we look through chorus brigade are we modeling after is the ce1 land yes okay ce1 which comes from the jazz core stamp first analog bill analog modulation pedal ever and it's impressive like again the vibrato mode super important yeah yeah and and one one thing to mention about this is that we james and i had a lot of long talks uh about this because you know these pedals have six knobs and some of these especially the modulation pedals some of them only have a few one of them only has one so it's like do you actually do you do that in the in the model as well or you sort of cheat and add more stuff and at the end of the day we decided you know the pedal is what the pedal is and this is what we want to capture so on astra people will actually find that some of the knobs don't do anything for some of the models like i'm a huge fan of that because too many knobs creates too many sounds that aren't good and especially when you're replicating old stuff that's so cool that you just said don't use the knob just get rid of it yeah sorry i'd butt it in there oh no it's fine so like on the car's brigade you know there's the uh the chorus part of of that circuit is literally a it's a one knob chorus and that's what it is like on the asteroid then when you switch to the vibrato mode it's it's a tune-up vibrato mode and the the the bottom row of knobs don't do anything at all okay so we have the flanger doubler which is what you just talked about trim 65 is that fender trim yes that is what are the specifics yeah what are the specifics is there a particular amp yeah actually it's at the same time we were uh actually getting a lot of just listening to spring tanks obviously i was ripping spring tanks out of a lot of vintage blackface and silver face fenders so at that same time i was able to also sort of evaluate with another uh my friend the dsp engineer uh ross duncan we would just listen to great tube tremolos and they're a tube tremolo is really interesting just because it as you know the um the faster they get the tube can't recover as fast and the photocell so they get softer and more musical as the speed goes up and there's all this little weird stuff that happens with the lamp and the in the tube so that that was sort of a fun research project to really map all the weird things that tube tremolo's again it seems super simple to go volume goes on volume goes off or a spring tank and then you realize we got to a point in development where we broke the four core arm processor huge platform we had because like we really wanted to nail all the weird stuff so yeah i know that sounds weird to say you're you're it's hard to do a tube tube circuit tremolo but it was it took a little bit of a yeah nothing's ever as simple as up and down no it's it's like you know it's like not layered chests one thing is moving the other thing moves uh phaser 90 mxr phase 9 is there a script anything particular you went for all of it actually all of it um uh different errors different modifications to those um and the funny thing with uh talking about pedal phase in general is the actual low headroom so a lot of the magic of those pedals is the fact that they start to clip on the input and there's a whole bunch of non-linear stuff making the face sort of get harmonics and if again you take that out typical digital modeling never had the headroom to do all the harmonic content going into those pedals yeah we we spent a lot of time doing stuff that you wouldn't notice until you said well let me be a real unit to this because our benchmarks were never other products there was always does this sound like the real golden references we had in storage what about dharma trim it's very very lost is there a reference there that was again a guy ross knuckley he had a thing for harmonic tremolo and he just it's like yeah the same thing about working on a weekend and we loved pitch-based kind of harmonic trim so we just started looking at circuits and he just one day he's like i made a harmonic tremolo i just wanted to do it and yeah you find folks that have their heart set on a certain sound and yes he had done all his other work on time and he's just like man i on my own time i just wanted to have so we started playing with it it has this cool dynamic processor and some other things that are um so if you play harder we get faster or slower why don't why don't we go through the modes and give give them some justice of physically hearing them um i don't want you know astros the the the last born here and i feel like we don't want to skimp over that because you know what happens when you have three kids and the younger kid yeah and and i think funny enough um this might be rick biato i i when we asked him what his favorite effect was i think it was kind of curious what his answer was because did we have the were there video issues there what i mean we can try it again the chat we want to try the rick biato video and just let the world melt down i changed something so if it if it messes up here's the thing this is live it's free it's free it's a free program nobody's paying a cable bill no if you don't you don't have to watch it we're gonna i'm gonna hit a button it's probably gonna burn to the ground and at least and we'll turn it off it's fine you're doing stuff you're washing dishes you're yeah you're well you know washing your you're washing stuff so here we go his name is rick yeah rick pietto here we go okay james my favorite favorite vintage fact that i i know definitely this is very easy easy this is my original 1970-88 mxr i buy buy in 1967 the first the first effect that i bought i bought it works great great it's a little bit noisy noisy i'm from rochester but it just sounds like we're in a stadium we're going to make it sound like leslie is is yeah sorry yeah it worked it kind of worked it worked it's good enough for me you know chad's saying there was some echo who's saying there was echo all the chat chat we knew there was we told you that exactly let's let's go through yeah i want to have some time here for people to ask you guys questions because this is really cool um but yeah let's do justice to the modulation machine it's so tempting because i'm such a delay not in reverb not and i'm kind of like i use a univibe so it's always tempting but but it's i use so much modulation when it's in places you know what i'm saying studio work and stuff when you need those sounds and this thing's really impressive so let's go through them and just at least hear them okay um and explain why they're cool because a lot of people especially younger younger people trying to figure out modulation is like trying to i don't know it's it can be very confusing um so hearing what this machine does it's going to trigger you know familiar songs familiar tones i think modulation for jhs as a company it's one of the harder things to get through with customer service because people just don't even know is it a phaser is it a univibe is it a flanger yeah and is it both is it all seven like you know so let's do that okay um i'll take this as a challenge to see if we can fill in what the differences are then i'll maybe i'll play two seconds of stuff cool and fail um so just for everyone i i sort of categorize things as in this order of phasing flanging chorusing and then sort of other and that all for me is based on the delay time and john i just you already know all this stuff but i think for everyone just you have these stages of modulation so phasing is so close to the signal that it creates a sort of notched out filter thing flanging can be like that but it almost crosses into chorusing a little bit and that comes from the classic misnomer that uh that andy summer used chorusing and he never used chorusing on police records it was actually a flanger and they can sound very similar because of the the modulating and the time delay offset um and then chorusing really has that sort of almost a little 50 60 100 millisecond you could push things out one of my my favorite chorus sounds are flangers pushed to do chorus sounds exactly exactly that that's a beautiful statement because there's a bunch of stuff in there that's missing so i'll pick it up from flanger and show you flanger down here finger i'll put on the flanger in this sort of and uh these are the based off mxr rack mount units and if anyone's done the research on that they're they were never reissued and they're not many recreations of that specific circuit so this one had almost tape flanger almost phase s kind of wish to it which sounds good with fuzz and if we push it out a little bit more all the regeneration back there's a cool little invert switch which knocks one side of the phase out actually i'll show you the pedalboard uh look at with a video this little control here [Applause] that that sends the other side of the signal out of phase so it has that sort of hollow almost zero through flanging sound and this is what rick's talking about is putting some speed on that [Music] almost faux leslie kind of chorusy thing yeah such a great sound yeah we could pull the regeneration back which is basically the feedback going into the delay line [Music] or we could get more steel drumicano and i think that's where rick was going is you could take a flanger and kind of turn it into anything pitched it's right in that middle zone like you were also saying and then we'll go back to actual like uh coarse brigade real chorus and just [Music] that's almost very high phi super sort of it's a lot smoother sounding so this is the ce1 and then and then we'll go into the vibrato mode which i actually like yeah [Music] vibrato is the modulation with no clean pass right no yep yep so it's just fully modulated and then chorus is adding that clean pass into into the vibrato into the vibrato again actually we'll switch over to the stereo one just so you can hear it on [Music] that's the flange let's go back to this and the weird thing with ce ones that you know as well is that they're not really stereo there's kind of a dry side and then the modulation on one side so this knob kind of lets you have both so you can have the classic side so in this case i've got one side modulated and the other side i'm not doing that we're not hearing it in stereo it's really cool [Music] both sides are chorus and then it's just one side again i love choruses uh i also like let's just go to tremolo they know i know we want to have time for everyone's questions so i could spend three hours on this but everyone will sleep i'll try it out so here's another the same knob actually lets you have stereo two stereo so tremolo for viewers tremolo is volume modulation so so chorus and vibrato are modulating pitch up and down so volume modulation is tremolo which is the same as turning the knob in your car up and down the volume knob or whatever right yeah which makes it which is so wrong because my fender amps all say vibrato and we all know poorly leo was a very confused person super confusing so they said and it has a soft and a hard uh sine wave so we have the stock tube version here you can make it in stereo it also that whole thing about the dual processing this is actually two of those running in stairs if i send it like ping pong delays they'll keep their it'll stay discreetly left and right stereo [Music] there's a secret hidden feature to that that i think we overlooked that these are dual processing on top of a trail thing so i'm going to flip over all right i shocked it oh when it pops up let me know and i'll explain to our wonderful viewers i guess it popped up [Music] if you're watching uh yeah so here's the thing we're back something happened it wasn't us actually there's something to do with youtube's cranky we're back um you didn't really miss anything i don't believe um here's what we're gonna do this has been super fun we've gone an hour and a half i want to open it up to questions and there's so many things i want to say this really could be like a four-hour deal i think it's a great opportunity to interface with ua themselves and just ask your questions like any of your burning questions any of us addison or nick you have any thoughts or comments before we jump into that i mean i think i think while we're fielding questions from people we should just do a teeny weeny little jam oh it's a tiny little one to let people do another jam with josh just yeah like do another little jam let people mull over their deepest darkest thoughts so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna do another zoom jam and we'll just uh i'm going to continue to not play guitar because frankly it's very relaxing just watching yeah come on man play all right if josh says you have to play you have to play josh josh i'm gonna switch to complete reverb and put on some echoplex from the starlight reverb i'm going to start a beat and hopefully this all works out fine kirin let's just let's actually pick it let's pick it you pick it josh what key you want oh just go a hey hey it is so easy i'm gonna run the golden with some memory man uh so [Music] yeah we'll see what happens okay all right i'm game i'm i didn't want to play here we go [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] my [Music] bye [Music] remember harmonic trim everyone [Music] do [Music] tori you want to shred over this indie rock jam [Music] [Applause] [Music] hahaha one two three four [Music] wow yeah yeah all right i got some rapid fire questions for you guys first of all tell me if it was in time and they said absolutely not if you're if you're watching this we're uh we're we're booking a tour right now they're we're going to be live on stage through zoom through a front of house yeah our band's called out of time yeah out of time but people are having fun that's all that matters that is dude actually reverb with the fuzz is ruling james it's really when you play it with like 92 gauge strings let's just play with the fuzz yeah demo with the fuzz oh dude and by the way i will be selling this guitar shortly after this uh if anyone would like to buy i think i had to give up after this are you you want this one instead is that what you're trying to say or it seems like a better choice after today we got questions we got questions we got questions okay let's do all right we'll just we'll do some rapid fire okay so um yeah are these algorithms unique to the platform so you guys you started from square one on all of these in the pedals that right yeah that's totally right i mean obviously we have the luxury of having a huge library of algorithms already but every single one of these algorithms have been tweaked to a uh to more of a lesser degree and a lot of them are brand new so even even the ones that are like oh they're pretty close to the to the originals that are you know the ones that we have on the uad platform there's stuff like a lot of them are not true stereo and the pedals are too stereo so even that stuff we had to do but they're all tweaked to us to to some degree okay and will there be any like platform sharing will we get any of the ua platform stuff in the pedals or vice versa there's no plans for that right now okay right now they're their own separate thing very cool the usb jack on the back there's no midi uh parts to the pedals right no actual like midi jacks it will that be midi enabled by chance any any uh option for that on the pedals or not really we don't have we don't have any plans for media at this point right now the usb port is for software updates and registering the pedals and we talked about some of these effects that are in the pedal uh like the phaser the downer trim stuff like that those you get you can download those when you register the pedals so when you buy the pedal it actually comes with the three algorithms that you see on the pedal and then you get the extra launch once you register the pedal and that's what you use the usb phone i want to say i i will never use midi i'm just i'm just not a midi person so lots of questions about midi yeah yeah and what i'm most interested in is like i haven't put midi in a single pedal like ever i don't know that i ever will i don't know and then you know lots of friends do what was what was your thought process for ua with not because i'm in your camp i've never done a mini pedal um and maybe to some people they're like why not put midi so what's what is the angle there is it just like me like you don't care like in the in the best way like you're just like i'm saying that in a positive way like josh do you use midi on your live rig like i do that's funny for a blues guy you know i i have a pretty complicated pedal board because i'm a nerd but i i ever since i moved to l.a and first met bob bradshaw i've been a proponent of luke okay and midi and i love the controls yeah i think this is a fun just an interesting thing to hear like oh yeah without midi yeah yep um okay so then james did you mention something about an app possibly or just like a desktop feature yeah there's actually a couple of things uh eventually there will there will be a desktop app that will let you get like software updates and you actually can get uh in fact i think what you have over there are ones i did for you but i think when you get the pedal you you'll register it you'll get the the the new algo because the the uh the dharma trim and the x90 uh they have to come from uh registering i'm never registering these they're totally black markets you got in fact you got pre-registered and prototype first draft boxes so those are the boxes before the box these are going in a glass case into a secret vault yeah yeah it's great yeah those those are the early ones so yeah uh there will be eventually a mobile app that will let you do the switch modes because we didn't even show you there there's the tap tempo modes there's live and preset uh there's uh you can enable that for like the astra if you want to tap tempo for the tremblos and the flanges and actually mine is set up with tap tremolo on the astra wow so they're bluetooth capable is that what you're saying they're absolutely coming that's awesome so you're you're sharing uh identical hardware it's different software across identical hardware platform like yeah but with some changes depending on which pedal it is so for example on astra um when you turn the pedal on it's all digital because we really need to color the dry sound and we also need to mix the wet and the dry in the right place whereas by default on on golden and starlight uh the pedals have analog drive through so that means that you know the the dry signal passes through analog even when the pedal is on but obviously for starlight which james talked about you know the coloration of like the the memory man and the echoplex for some guys that's really important that's a big part of the sound so in the app you can actually decide whether you want analog drive through or whether you want to turn on the entire emulation and actually color the drive sound as well so that's all available in the app i love that i've used an h 1 type h9 for years the apps you know i'm down with the apps i'm not down with midi but i'll do an app hey i want an app you can throw an app at me all day let's go well the the cool thing a lot of people are asking like will these receive updates and effects added to them over time and all that stuff and it it sounds like you know that's totally the case i mean well you know what and i know i think for tourists we never talk about what we're going to do in the future yeah okay but but i will say the the pain that it takes to put bluetooth and usbc on something yeah this point does point to a bright future you just don't know what it is that's great so yeah what what i would like to stress though is that you know people who are interested in these pedals should buy them for what they are yeah you know for what might come later you know there's always this oh they'll probably throw in feature whatever and then it'll be perfect you know it's always anybody who's made products that are digital will always sort of you know there's this expectation that you know forever and ever you'll keep adding new stuff and we definitely you know have a lot of great ideas for that but you know we feel like the pedals are really cool as they are and that's what people should buy yeah absolutely i'm going to be super disappointed if there's not like an rv2 update or like uh or like that i've been a sound tank belay like the plastic you can hear the sound the plastic one yeah i want to hear the way that the plastic foot switch scrapes across the casing james oh yes i hate to say that i know that and uh i think the rv3 might sound better than the two does it on the bottom you need to buy ten of each and then actually you know sort of eight when you model them there's like josh josh goes over to james's house it's like midnight one night and james is like in the floor with 15 rv twos he has a notepad and he's like this one has a pink label this one has a label oh when i tear the bottom screws off it makes this sound oh you're right no not the screws no they have to go back in the same hole i had this one rv2 that only had two screws it sounded better i swear i think the plastic there's actually a stinger for this and now it's time for meticulously obsessing over small details no one should care about oh oh yeah oh man i i you know what i i will let you see something even weirder we will double down on that and just just to say that uh even the picks on my desk the color actually matters to the sound i can't go there now come on those are two those are two different shades of red of a jazz which one sounds better the darker blood red one which doesn't actually exist in the real world i have jimmy make them for me they're great over donut by the way it's a different color it sounds sweater that's why my friends let's move on to that next question before we end up getting a new yes do you want to talk about the differences between clones real quick i'm kidding okay uh i have i have two i like the early horsey i personally like the white the short goal has a more thick resounding system see i disagree i disagree the parts are all the same but man that tail no no it's the epoxy there's a certain year that the epoxy was a little softer i think softer epoxy creates a softer bloom in the note y'all are killing me over here all right all right all right all right next question next question okay yes yes it's currently march 2nd march 3rd what's the date i don't know it's something like that when is something we're relative you know when is when should people expect to be able to be playing these on their pedal board any ideas late march is what we're shooting for right now that's awesome and that proves my theory ma'am stands for not available maybe may or march or march proven every time you know about that some some may or some match doesn't necessarily have to be this year just you know yeah i debuted the seesaw in like 2014 and march it's are we about to drop the seesaw i know we're not about to drop the seesaw all right it might still happen has told me this would come out in march and now they told me it will come out in may see not available maybe me josh knows what's up well we i i call that the chinese democracy issue if for anyone who knows their guns and roses history that's great okay so last question from me um right now anyways uh you're asking questions vicariously correct these aren't from like you didn't stay up at night well as we were talking i had some of these questions but i realized a lot of people also have these things so we're on we're all on the same page here how great is that um how many years start to finish across all three of these pedals combined any idea how many water how many years start to finish have you guys spent on these pedals what i'm what i want to get at is like people talking about um like price point why are these at the price point they are i'm here you guys talk and hearing the tone of them and i'm going well i don't know of another pedal that i want to chime in like just like take like this most simple overdrive or something i could ever put out it takes a year to do that and people think like there's always a comment like uh they'll see something and just think we like whipped it up two months before yes it takes a year to do on a level of any production like if i just make a tube screamer clone right now like a straight and try to get it in production through distribution testing a year so like this i can't even can't fathom so it took it took if we it's tough to say because um a lot of the um we've sort of been cheating because even though i said before that a lot of these algorithms are brand new we still have a library of stuff that we can sort of piggyback on i don't want to think about how long it would take if we didn't have some of the plate reverb stuff that we could use as some of the other stuff but it if we if we look back on when this project was originally begun thinking about that was actually before i even started at ua so that's i would say around three years from like yeah first ideas until you know we're we're around here yeah i'll make it worse and be completely honest with the question is there was a number of things in here that i did five years ago that were too big to even run on anything the r d there's a couple of things that were the tech didn't exist is what you're saying yeah there's um it's this has been some of the stuff has been there as long as i've been there which is six probably six official years uh because we didn't know how to how to even there wasn't a processor that fit in a pedal sized box that would even do this yet what is the processor by the way uh it's a arm we're on arm arm which is a four a four card super powerful stuff which is which nobody should really care about except it's interesting to talk about i know you probably do i've had yeah because i've i've chewed around on like one day we might do something probably digital but yeah the arm arm the the duel is insane yeah yeah that and because if you start talking the history of like keith bard spin processors and sharks and i love all that stuff and we knew all those guys going and uh where they designed all that stuff well and i think there's a popular maybe misconception i love it we can't see nate let's get the nick cam yeah he's looking good i think there's like a popular misconception that dsp means easy yeah like but it's like oh well it's just digital you guys there was a comment yeah it's like come on hey come on james it's just digital like i i think the best one's like those are just plugins running in a pedal yeah okay i don't even know how to answer someone who says that yeah yeah again again it's important if you're watching this if you've hung around this long you're a super nerd and it's important that you understand things are invented like dsp for other tasks not guitar and they evolve to a certain point and we have evolved over 20 plus years of realistic usable dsp at this level and and i just want to say first of all i'm not like i don't work for you i think i just need to say that again like nobody's james isn't like sliding me hundred dollars josh isn't even i'm jo we said earlier josh is just paying me an experience so i can i'm fully can vouch for nick lives in my garage yeah so yeah i just want to say when people talk about price points it's so crazy to further evolve tech and it's incredibly expensive time-wise it's like when someone says let's go to the basic level i mentioned a tube screamer whatever you know someone will say like i could build that for twelve dollars in my in my basement sure go ahead but like do this yeah and i think the price point on this is like it is what it is and it's a great price it works one part of the price point is the effort and the time that it took to to make the pedals but the other thing is also just you know the decision to make something that is you know beautiful yeah robust craftsmanship you know there's also a decision on whether you wanted like a super cheap plastic box or what do you want you know there's a lot of decisions that went into the pedal that you know made them more expensive because we wanted to make the the best possible pedal in any way that we could no one's seeing uh universal audios bill for like a million dollars on metal extrusions or something oh god like i know i know all of that i know what you're dealing with and it's just it's i think there's just yeah go ahead even the fact that you know we we paint all the petals fully and then afterwards we actually grind them down to get that you know the raw aluminum wow and then we cover them again after that so it's just you know there's been so many choices where you go like well that's stupid because it's more expensive but again yeah that's what makes the pedals cool and make them feel special yeah i hear that grinding down really affects like the 40k frequency yeah i've heard that too totally that's why we did it it's you know it totally opens up the pedal well you have to grind between 6 p.m and 9 p.m at night oh i hear that is it a wet grinder is it like when you talk about grinding at 6 00 pm but what do you yeah [Laughter] [Music] hey i'm looking i'm looking for something to interrupt a stinger i have nothing i have a question uh did did either of you have you guys worked on any of the other uad plug-ins or is this kind of like your first man that's a good question yeah uh yeah actually there's a couple of plug-ins uh i did early on a thing called the 55 tweed deluxe okay yeah as a youtube plugin and then i spent a lot of time working on a korg delay this is the famous uh edge core delay yeah so i i did turn that into a plug-in and i will tell you that um that experience was interesting because uh the cork folks actually i met some other folks and i finished the plug and they had to have a sign off in japan with the original designers and they went through every every switch and weird hiccup and i got a very nice note from corcoran you very much respected our product and we signed off on this plug-in so there's actually an official process when you have these these these things that if we don't nail everything i think people expect us to get a hundred percent of the flaws and nice things about an effect so uh it can be a very stressful thing which is probably why i don't leave the house or this yeah i guess we're an in a wrapper i got like final closing statements here like from you this has been awesome thank you for coming on oh man thank you guys you guys you guys i can't believe you guys pulled this this has been a nice little experiment um for us and the pedals are amazing we're you know huge fans of ua we every live show everything's processing through ua um nick has the use of the ox at home like we're we're fans we practically use ua for years all of us so thank you thank you for letting me have a job because if people actually like this stuff i get to continue yeah stuff maybe that oxbox will sell one day i i i i'm gonna i know it's it's yeah it's embarrassing it's it's it's uh maybe just like a what do you want people to if they've hung around this long they're invested in some form of uh yeah they're psychotic or they're really interested so what do you want to tell them you know at this closing point i i feel like i'm at the end of a court case and i'm speaking to the judge pleading my tone case of why this happened i i think and i'm curious for everybody else here involved too mob you know for me i i wouldn't uh okay put it bluntly i don't like wasting time on stuff that doesn't seem like it's gonna push forward or give you some great tone result so as many of the crazy things that i work on here if it isn't to do something creative and new i don't like working on stuff somebody's already done so if i felt like is there something that could could we really do the echoplex top to bottom and a memory man and one little pedal that has spell over and sounds just like my real units can we do that and that was the exciting part for me was to do that in the delay space and the reverb space and the modulation space and then having tor come on board really just ignited like wow i think we can actually pull this off and so for me i hope that if anyone was a fan of these older pieces of gear had used them or always wanted to use them and felt like you really like if you if your sound is that echoplex into a spring into an amp and that's really where you want to live that we delivered that experience and that that sort of shock of it's feeding back and kind of inspiring you with the sound and the depth of the 3d things that all the fluffy words we use about why something sounds good i just want you to plug it in go i kind of want to play guitar and i don't want to turn knobs anymore does it sound cool yeah i want to do the homework for you so you don't have to my unsolicited statement is off the back of yours it is these have in them the things that inspire me as a guitar player about the pedal it's not just about the tone or the sound that's super one-dimensional playing that memory man and being and feeling it coming up underneath your fingers and the way it dissolves that's cool like that's i think that's what you're saying is i just want to second that i think that's a super good point and i think you know when we sit around here talk about you know nerding out on the most intricate details about some of these products um the fact of the matter is that there's a lot of guys out there who've never tried the real thing right so they don't have that frame of reference oh it sounds exactly like you know the real one but you know there's a reason why these original products are so revered it's because they have something magical in them that you know makes you want to play guitar makes you want to you know create stuff and you know if we can if we can give you know people that even if they have never tried the real thing but if we can sort of capture that that magic that these original boxes had you know i think that you know i'd be pretty happy that's awesome well i guess that's a good closer josh you got any like final words of inspiration up there and mostly for me i i'm inspired by all of you guys who are willing to put in the time and effort to make a product that makes guitar players uh you know feel feel something anything good or bad but inspires us to play and to make music and you know on a personal note i mean tor and james are my friends i've had relationships with them for a long time now and especially james i i spent a lot of time with james and so i i get a kick out of people seeing the results of his labor and the amount of work that i know he puts in these pedals i think are really special they're simple but just in terms of tone and what they do i don't think there's anything else that kind of measures up and i think most of that is from the guys you're seeing here yes there's incredible hardware in here but it's the work that i know they've put into it yeah well i i know i might i think i might have the closure and maybe i shouldn't say this publicly but i'll just go ahead because i don't think i can top this just safe this this is this lines of what we were all just saying is i did sent my prototype set to this guy named eric johnson so i sent it to him in december just to get a gauge if i was going the right direction and i figured he would call and ask how to use them and over the hall and i'm like did you send those players like oh i meant to call you but i went ahead and already used them i tracked two songs on my record already he's inappropriately meticulous yeah superman and i figured he would call it a complaint first and he skipped over straight to oh i meant to tell you i've already recorded with them sorry i didn't even need you to tell me how to use them that's that's all i ask for just if you like the pedals and you play them i think my job is done and and i thank tor for coming on board and you know kicking the company into into this sort of new world that work the user interface is is simple it gets to the point it's inspiring and i think you guys did a great job and james you're not crazy all those hours but you know it's all wait it did but i but are you crazy if we're both crazy we call ourselves not crazy you know if we think about that things don't work we just let it go we're not crazy we're totally crazy we're not crazy right no we're no no we're fine we're good that's it i guess so yeah if you will shut it down at this if you like this as usual hit like subscribe click the bell icon uh we have a patreon account you can go check that out for like longer nerdy classroom style talks yeah i just did some recent longer than this oh almost almost yeah like uh there's all kinds of cool stuff over there i do almost like philosophical i've been doing this journey through invention and evolution in the eras of gear which has been really fun the jhs show um there's a site you can go check out all the episodes there's merch all that kind of stuff as well we even have t-shirts that they're kind of cool you can check those out or not we honestly don't care at the end of the day thanks for watching this go check out the ua stuff watch some demos watch this over and over until you no longer have any friends all right bye bye everybody you

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 81,874

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer

Id: 2IWWtG2Kzqc

Length: 109min 45sec (6585 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021