Recording - July 2011 - 30

Grab Bag

A Guitar Gear

formats: the full-sized pedal we reviewed, a Eurorack-format synth module, and a small pedal version (the “GC Civilian Issue”) which removes some of the full version’s features in exchange for a lower price. Of all the pedals we worked with, the Geiger Counter was the least intuitive and took the most study to get working; that’s because some of its controls and functions are very familiar to the average guitarist, some are a bit unusual, and at least one is completely insane. The WMD’s signal path starts with a straight-up high-gain preamp, with a Gain knob and a Tone control that ranges from lowpass filtering for heavy lows and muddy highs, through highpass filtering for intense highs with no lows at all. From there, the signal is digitized at high quality, only to then be fed into processors that destroy it... There are two knobs labeled Sample Rate and Bit Depth, which let you directly control the quality of the sound. Sample Rate can be dialed down from “better than CD” to 280 Hz in extremely coarse or fine increments, and Bit Depth can be changed from a maximum of 8 bits to a minimum of 1... and we’re not talking about DSD 1-bit, either. The Bit Depth control can be switched either to work directly on the signal resolution or to work in Mask mode, which frankly I don’t understand at all (and I read that part of the manual five times!) but which produces unpredictable harmonic and gain changes that can be really cool. The Bit Depth control can affect the signal before or after the Wave Table processor which is the center of the Geiger Counter. William describes the Wave Table stage as something that “takes your signal and destroys it with math.” In very simple terms, a wave table is a map of output level vs. input level. It says, “If an input signal is exactly this loud, it comes out with its loudness changed to this value on the table; if you make the input a tiny bit louder, it comes out as this next value on the table; and so on.” So if a wave table were a straight 45-degree line from lower left to upper right, it wouldn’t do anything to the signal at all, just pass it through unchanged—output equals input. But that’s no fun, right? The Geiger Counter comes with 252 Wave Tables loaded on board, and they range from simple compression to allout tonal destruction. Keep a paper and pencil handy to note which tables sound good on which sounds; one table could give an amazing hollow flangy distortion, while the very next one could produce nothing but noise. The Geiger Counter has a CV Input, a standard 1/4" TRS jack that lets you hook up an expression pedal and sweep the Bit Depth, the Sample Rate, or both. My favorite was the Sample Rate, a control which produced the most extraordinary whooshing flanged filter effects you’ve ever heard, but messing with the Bit Depth could be fun, too, depending on the sounds we fed the Geiger Counter. The only operational hassle with this part of the pedal was getting it set up in the first place; there is no UI feedback except two tri-color LEDs. You have to remember that for the Sample Rate knob, green means CV control, red means fine tuning range, and yellow means both, and for Bit Depth, green means CV control, red means the Bit Depth control goes before the Wave Table rather than after, and yellow means both... and you have to
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push-click the Wave Table knob repeatedly to cycle through the 16 possible combinations of settings for the two controls. Bleah. The Wave Table’s LED display uses hexadecimal notation (where you count up to 16 with one digit using 0–9 and A–F), which also takes a little getting used to but isn’t at all a non-starter: you’re not doing math with those numbers, just remembering which one leads to which table, and it’s as easy to write down “0A” or “3F” as it is to write down “10” or “63”. This pedal didn’t get a lot of attention in our first set of tests, because it was obviously something that would require some focused work, but our notes from our initial tests are telling. I wrote: “Wow. I mean, wow. Unbelievably crazy distortion effects that respond in weird ways to playing dynamics, nothing like what you’d hear on any other pedal. This is as Cyberpunk as the Eau Claire Thunder is Old Skule. CV pedal control of Bit Depth and Sample Rate is just SICK.” Darwin added, “Put this thing through an echo box and it’s an instant art-gallery gig!” Darwin took the Geiger Counter back to his studio after our first session and worked with it for a week, and in the end he had this to say: “The Geiger Counter is idiosyncratic to the extreme, but when you find the right combination of what you want to play and what you want it to sound like, it will do stuff nothing else can do. Realize that not all settings work for all material. Some are note-dependent, some are tone-dependent, some are volume-dependent. It’s not clear from the front panel controls how to get at the sound you want, so you have to be patient and persistent, but when you get to where you want to be, you’ll have results that no other pedal can match.” And, I might add, this was yet another pedal he didn’t want to have to return, so he wasn’t being coy about its sound. That pretty much sums it up. Listen to the audio files, check out the company’s website, and be prepared to hear things you didn’t realize a guitar could do... and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention William’s admonishment that the Geiger Counter is available with a frequency modification that gives it a full-range audio output suitable for bass, keyboards, and even drum loops. So you can mangle any sound source you like, not just your guitar! A unique pedal among unique pedals, for sure.... Godlyke Power-All System $22.50 and up; www.godlyke.com Pedals need power, and batteries die right when you need them. Wall warts take up a ton of space in your power strip, ground loops can cause all manner of noises and crud, and the power supply that works great with one pedal won’t work at all with another because the plug’s the wrong shape or the polarity’s backwards. While not all of these problems are solved with the Power-All line from Godlyke Distributing, enough of them are that we were happy to give it a spin... especially since a lot of the pedals we reviewed didn’t come with power supplies! The Power-All system centers around a digital switching power supply that offers a number of advantages over traditional transformer-based supplies. It’s light as a feather, takes up only one slot on a power strip, delivers a whopping 2000 mA of power at 9VDC, and doesn’t set up RF hum that can be audible in nearby equipment like a transformer can. While there’s always the possibility that a digital switching supply can set up noise in other devices plugged into the same circuit, we didn’t hear any in our tests, and we believe that good grounding and isolation practices will minimize or eliminate any problems you might run into. Godlyke sent us the PA-9B Basic Kit, which included one Power-All digital supply, a daisy-chain cable that can power five effects at a time, and four color-coded adapter cables for effects that don’t use the traditional center-negative barrel connector. There’s a red cable for center-positive effects,

http://www.godlyke.com

Recording - July 2011

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