u/yep808

Guess which pedal is on its way to fill the empty space in the middle :- )

Signal path: Peterson tuner ➡️ Strymon OB.1 compressor/boost ➡️ "????" ➡️ Big Muff (Ram's head) ➡️ Ravenstone 1959 (JCM800) ➡️ Boss GE-7 ➡️ MD-200 (modulation all in one) ➡️ DD-200 (delay all in one) ➡️ Iridium.

My wife has been learning and practicing quite a lot of bass lately. Her birthday was coming up and I thought it'd be nice to build her her very first bass pedalboard.

My prior knowledge of stompboxes was mostly for guitars, but it wasn't hard to transfer it to bass. After hours of research I finalized a four-pedal rig, with the signal chain being "Peterson StroboStomp -> Empress Bass Compressor -> Bass Big Muff Pi 2 -> Sansamp Bass Driver DI V2". Fender Engine Room LVL5 serves as the power supply. I used Pedal Playground to sketch out the rough dimensions (see last picture).

I bought everything (the 4 pedals, the Nano+ board, misc tools etc) in one go, and they arrived this week. I built the pedalboard in front of her this evening - it was a really fun experience, and she loved how it turned out. We are gonna take it to band practice tomorrow to see how well it performs.

My wife has been learning and practicing quite a lot of bass lately. Her birthday was coming up and I thought it'd be nice to build her her very first bass pedalboard.

My prior knowledge of stompboxes was mostly for guitars, but it wasn't hard to transfer it to bass. After hours of research I finalized a four-pedal rig, with the signal chain being "Peterson StroboStomp -> Empress Bass Compressor -> Bass Big Muff Pi 2 -> Sansamp Bass Driver DI V2". Fender Engine Room LVL5 serves as the power supply. I used Pedal Playground to sketch out the rough dimensions (see last picture).

I bought everything (the 4 pedals, the Nano+ board, misc tools etc) in one go, and they arrived this week. I built the pedalboard in front of her this evening - it was a really fun experience, and she loved how it turned out. We are gonna take it to band practice tomorrow to see how well it performs.

My wife has been learning and practicing quite a lot of bass lately. Her birthday was coming up and I thought it'd be nice to build her her very first bass pedalboard.

My prior knowledge of stompboxes was mostly for guitars, but it wasn't hard to transfer it to bass. After hours of research I finalized a four-pedal rig, with the signal chain being "Peterson StroboStomp -> Empress Bass Compressor -> Bass Big Muff Pi 2 -> Sansamp Bass Driver DI V2". Fender Engine Room LVL5 serves as the power supply. I used Pedal Playground to sketch out the rough dimensions (see last picture).

I bought everything (the 4 pedals, the Nano+ board, misc tools etc) in one go, and they arrived this week. I built the pedalboard in front of her this evening - it was a really fun experience, and she loved how it turned out. We are gonna take it to band practice tomorrow to see how well it performs.

My wife has been learning and practicing quite a lot of bass lately. Her birthday was coming up and I thought it'd be nice to build her her very first bass pedalboard.

My prior knowledge of stompboxes was mostly for guitars, but it wasn't hard to transfer it to bass. After hours of research I finalized a four-pedal rig, with the signal chain being "Peterson StroboStomp -> Empress Bass Compressor -> Bass Big Muff Pi 2 -> Sansamp Bass Driver DI V2". Fender Engine Room LVL5 serves as the power supply. I used Pedal Playground to sketch out the rough dimensions (see last picture).

I bought everything (the 4 pedals, the Nano+ board, misc tools etc) in one go, and they arrived this week. I built the pedalboard in front of her this evening - it was a really fun experience, and she loved how it turned out. We are gonna take it to band practice tomorrow to see how well it performs.

I've been using Valeton GP-200 with Silverface '68 Deluxe Reverb tube amp for ~2 years and recently decided to update my setup. The lead guitarist in my band is an analog pedal advocate and has a beautifully massive pedalboard. I'm a huge fan of analog pedals myself and love watching pedal reviews, JHS deep dives, and reading books about stompboxes. However, as the vocalist/rhythm guitarist in the band, between controlling my VE-500 vocal processor and singing (well, shouting mostly) into the microphone and playing rhythm guitar, I have little mental headroom left for operating an analog pedalboard tap-dance during live performances. So I decided that I'm not ready for analog yet and looked into upgrading to another multi-fx unit.

I researched pretty extensively on flagship multi-fx units and in the end narrowed down to either Line6 Helix Floor or Boss GT-1000. On the used market, they are going for very similar prices in my area. I love the scribble texts on the Helix Floor (even if I don't rely on them much, they just look very cool aesthetically) and its colorful screen, but also drawn to GT-1000's objectively superior low latency, seamless patch switch, and subjectively, its tone. Helix Floor, from the many videos I watched, always sound more digital despite having tons more effects and amp choices. For these reasons, I bought the GT-1000 over Helix Floor.

Carrying my heavy silverface tube amp to band practice every week also became more and more a chore I do not enjoy. Before getting the GT-1000, I used my Valeton GP-200 for its effects only and rely on the Silverface for amp/cab tone shaping. Now that I have much better amp modeling in my new Boss multi-fx, I decide to take advantage of it and experiment pairing it with an FRFR.

I see great reviews on Fender FR-12 and found a good deal on a used unit. It arrived this week and it definitely did not disappoint! I think the resonance from its wood housing is what gives it the magical amp-in-the-room feel as opposed to a standard plastic PA speaker. From my (intermediate, but in no way advanced) guitar playing, I am getting the same enjoyment out of the FR-12 and my tube amp. I feel the air hum and move when I stand in front of the FRFR, like I do with my Silverface.

Back to the GT-1000. First impression is that it sounds really good. The latency difference is real after playing the Valeton for years. The UI/UX really sucks though by 2020s standard. Thankfully, I'm a software engineer by trade and have seen my fair share of bad user interface designs from internal tooling. Turns out that Boss' interface and workflow, although primitive at a glance, is actually very logically grouped. After skimming the documentation (also a familiar exercise for my job anyways) and 15 minutes of practice, I can edit the unit pretty efficiently now. I haven't tried the desktop Tone Studio or Bluetooth pairing app yet - I imagine that workflow would be even easier.

I'm specifically enjoying the generically-named MDP (Multi-Dimensional Processing) effects and amps. In many cases they sound and play better than the other "branded" effects that's mimicking real-world pedals.

So there you go, an initial review on my new gear. Gonna bring them to my band rehearsal next week and see if performs as well as my previous setup.

I've been using Valeton GP-200 with Silverface '68 Deluxe Reverb tube amp for ~2 years and recently decided to update my setup. The lead guitarist in my band is an analog pedal advocate and has a beautifully massive pedalboard. I'm a huge fan of analog pedals myself and love watching pedal reviews, JHS deep dives, and reading books about stompboxes. However, as the vocalist/rhythm guitarist in the band, between controlling my VE-500 vocal processor and singing (well, shouting mostly) into the microphone and playing rhythm guitar, I have little mental headroom left for operating an analog pedalboard tap-dance during live performances. So I decided that I'm not ready for analog yet and looked into upgrading to another multi-fx unit.

I researched pretty extensively on flagship multi-fx units and in the end narrowed down to either Line6 Helix Floor or Boss GT-1000. On the used market, they are going for very similar prices in my area. I love the scribble texts on the Helix Floor (even if I don't rely on them much, they just look very cool aesthetically) and its colorful screen, but also drawn to GT-1000's objectively superior low latency, seamless patch switch, and subjectively, its tone. Helix Floor, from the many videos I watched, always sound more digital despite having tons more effects and amp choices. For these reasons, I bought the GT-1000 over Helix Floor.

Carrying my heavy silverface tube amp to band practice every week also became more and more a chore I do not enjoy. Before getting the GT-1000, I used my Valeton GP-200 for its effects only and rely on the Silverface for amp/cab tone shaping. Now that I have much better amp modeling in my new Boss multi-fx, I decide to take advantage of it and experiment pairing it with an FRFR.

I see great reviews on Fender FR-12 and found a good deal on a used unit. It arrived this week and it definitely did not disappoint! I think the resonance from its wood housing is what gives it the magical amp-in-the-room feel as opposed to a standard plastic PA speaker. From my (intermediate, but in no way advanced) guitar playing, I am getting the same enjoyment out of the FR-12 and my tube amp. I feel the air hum and move when I stand in front of the FRFR, like I do with my Silverface.

Back to the GT-1000. First impression is that it sounds really good. The latency difference is real after playing the Valeton for years. The UI/UX really sucks though by 2020s standard. Thankfully, I'm a software engineer by trade and have seen my fair share of bad user interface designs from internal tooling. Turns out that Boss' interface and workflow, although primitive at a glance, is actually very logically grouped. After skimming the documentation (also a familiar exercise for my job anyways) and 15 minutes of practice, I can edit the unit pretty efficiently now. I haven't tried the desktop Tone Studio or Bluetooth pairing app yet - I imagine that workflow would be even easier.

I'm specifically enjoying the generically-named MDP (Multi-Dimensional Processing) effects and amps. In many cases they sound and play better than the other "branded" effects that's mimicking real-world pedals.

So there you go, an initial review on my new gear. Gonna bring them to my band rehearsal next week and see if performs as well as my previous setup.

Disclaimer: Exercism is 100% free. I am in no way associated with the platform. I typed every word below as my genuine opinion.

I've been an Emacs user for many years. I'm passionate about trying new Emacs packages and configuring my setup. I never thought of myself as a true Emacs Lisp programmer. I picked up some Elisp here and there by reading others' configs, occasionally inspecting package source code, and writing small util functions to hack behaviors of my editor; but I never studied the language properly. I've tried several times to sit down and read "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" but never really got far.

One week ago, I discovered Exercism from a Rust YouTuber suggesting its interactive LeetCode style interface as a good way to pick up a language. To my surprise, I found Emacs Lisp on there with ~100 curated exercises. I'm a software engineer by trade so I'm more than familiar with platforms like LeetCode/HackerRank (you kinda have to if you wanna survive the tech interviews). I started doing the Elisp exercises and within a week I've gone through half of the track, grew a solid foundation of essential builtin C primitives and seq and cl-lib functions, motivated myself to run benchmarks against different ways to code the same thing, picked up IELM for local testing purposes, and overall gained a much stronger grasp on the language. I highly highly recommend anyone who wants to learn Emacs Lisp to try out Exercism. Here are some pros and cons after using the platform for ~1 week:

Pros:

• ~100 algorithm exercises (mostly focused on list/vector/string manipulation). Free, zero setup overhead except creating an account to track your progress (I log in via GitHub). You can code directly in the web UI, or copy paste from a local Emacs editor like how I do it.
• You can view community solutions after you've solved a question, to see how you can improve. The platform records multiple submissions, and you can even track the submission progress of other people to see how *they* have improved over time on the same problem. I've expanded my horizon on seq v.s. cl-lib a lot by reading other people's code. Slowly I formed my own opinion on these libraries after running some benchmarks.

Cons:

• The platform assumes you have a good grasp on data structures and algorithms. If you've never done LeetCode / HackerRank before, some of the problems marked as "Easy" may not feel that easy at all.
• Some languages on Exercism (like C++, Go, Clojure) have a learning track with proper tutorials. Emacs Lisp is not one of them. You only have exercises for this language.
• There isn't a good way to filter community solutions. You can sort by "highest rep users" by it doesn't mean their solutions are the most optimized.
• Unit tests coverage is usually good but often no real "stress tests". Coming from LeetCode I'm used to seeing how fast my code ran (as a percentage of all submissions, or absolute milliseconds). I expect to fail (time limit exceeded) if I did not use the most optimal time compexity / big-oh to solve the problem. Exercism tests are too lenient in this aspect. You'll only exceed time limit if you accidentally coded an infinite loop.
• Many exercises do not define the expected output well/detailed enough. Good news is that the unit tests are completely open. I've worked around this by reading the problem statement first, then directly reading the unit tests before I start writing code.

This last point is probably the most important. Reading unit tests is a must for many questions, because the problem statement simply do not define the expectation well. I'm planning to finish the Emacs Lisp track and re-read the Emacs Lisp book. In near future I might collect my Elisp learning journey into a blog post on my website.

P.s. I wrote several blog posts on Emacs: https://ianyepan.github.io/tags/emacs/ and also maintain the Yay-Evil Emacs kickstart-style config for new Emacsers: https://github.com/ianyepan/yay-evil-emacs