Attached my revised conceptual design.
Hope you're happy now, because of you there are loads more options I want to build in. Bye Bye easy concept . Edit: after writing the last bit of this I decided to leave the eq and compressors out for now... hello nice clean concept!
So what do I want, what is the "thing" I want to build, what is my "project mission statement" (PMS,
).
I want to build a 19" unit, preferably finished this decade, that enables me to use, as flexible as possible, overdrive to a signal, mono and stereo. KTS (key target sources) are drumbuss, (drum)loops and single drum hits (mostly snare and kick). The flexible lay out will have to encourage experimenting. Of course, in 25 years it will turn out that this will be
THE classic mandoline mangling device.
My musical background is being the guitarplayer in an alternative pop band and producing Hip Hop / D&B / Dub.
A lot of inspiration for this unit comes from an article in Sound on sound:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr10/articles/distortion.htm.
What I want the unit at least to do is:
1. add oomp and agressiveness to low end
2. add bite and agressiveness to mid/high end
3. distort the shit out of anything or add mild almost inaudible edges of drive
4. help sounds to cut through mixes
1&2 call for a multiband distortion. Low freq react so much different on drive than high freq that if you wanna do serious distortion of multiple sources, imo, you have to split somewhere around 400Hz. After my tests I found that I always came back to a crossover frequency between 350 and 500hz. Also, that split needs to be pretty drastic. If there was too much overlap, the end result became horrible, and not in a good way. That is why Iam thinking towards what you call a high class crossover. I absolutely loved the concept of a fully adjustable crossover, but I just did not feel the need for it at all when experimenting with it.
As with the overlap on the crossover filters, I noticed that blending too many copied and or processed signals together just got messy. That is why I decided to go for a design that leaves the original signal as intact as possible. That is why I dropped my originally mix/blend functionality per band / drive and replaced that by adding the different bands to the original. That way you prevent mixing two signals that each are a blend of the same original signal with a different added distortion. When Iam thinking user interface, I see something like a small mixer at the far right side of the frontpanel with levels for the original and the different processed signals.
With distortion, you add harmonics to the signal that were not there before. Filtering before distortion to my mind therefore makes less sense then filtering after distortion. On the other hand, a pre/post switch can't be that difficult, so why not.
Pre distortion filtering makes no sense however for a third drive / distortion I added to my concept: a copy of the original signal goes through a bad ass distortion and then through a bad ass high pass filter. That way the high harmonics could add some excitement and brightness. Reading about that way of excitement while I am writing this however tells me that the usual route is high pass before distortion... makes no sense in my mind... would love to get input on that one.
This big story leads me to 4 different audio signals mixed together at the end. One clean and three distorted and filtered. Damn I might as well just buy Craig Anderton's quadra fuzz
I think I am not going to bother with EQ and compression in the design for now. First build the distortion units, and then start thinking about adding the eq and comp, and where.
Pffff.....