A look at some of the ways in which budget effects units can be coaxed into giving surprisingly high quality results, and which ones can't.

With many of the currently available effects units costing more than a basic cassette based multitrack set-up, it's not surprising that many of our readers can't afford to buy state of the art signal processors. It is however possible to achieve excellent results using either effects pedals, kits or other budget gear provided that you know in which areas compromises can best be made without noticeably degrading the quality of your recording. A piece of low cost equipment may suffer in several areas depending on its function, but the most common areas are signal to noise ratio, frequency response and flexibility. There's also a good chance that the signal levels required by a pedal will be less than an ideal match for a mixer, especially one that works at +4dBm and even mixers designed to work at -10dBm often utilise the +4dBm standard at their insert points. You can usually turn down the drive to the pedal using the channel input gain control to match up the input but you may need to boost up the output from the pedal in order to match the level to the following circuitry. To this end, we've included a design for a simple level matcher included in this issue, which can be used to directly replace one of the PCBs in the H&SR patchbay. Anyway, more of that later, let's look at a few standard effects and see what savings can be made.

Echo

Echo is one of the most popular effects around, though it now seems to be usually referred to as delay which I always thought was a by-product of British Rail. The current trend is to use digital delay units or DDLs because of their good bandwidth, long delays and low noise but these are still too expensive for many people, even though you can buy something like the excellent Vesta Kozo DIG411 for little over £200 (reviewed last month). This leaves us with tape loop machines or analogue delays, both of which have their problems, but which can be put to good use nonetheless.

Analogue delays suffer from limited delay time, typically 300mS maximum, and their bandwidth is unlikely to exceed 4kHz. Also, some of the cheaper models are excessively noisy, so you should go for a reputable make such as Boss, Carlsboro, Ibanez and so on. The limited delay time is not as serious as you might think as one second repeats are seldom used to create echoes as such, these are more for the creation of special effects. 300mS will cover most standard requirements. Limited bandwidth may be more or less of a problem, depending on the application. You may have noticed that the new generation of DDLs incorporate a hi-cut switch to deliberately reduce the bandwidth of the device and this is in response to a demand for a softer echo sound which lends itself well to vocal treatments. A very bright delay on vocals can be too obtrusive and so you may find an analogue unit just right.

For use with instruments, the fact that the direct sound from the instrument is nice and bright may tend to disguise the fact that the following echoes are a little dull but if you're setting up rhythmic sequencer effects using delay, this deficiency may become more obvious. You can't improve matters by using EQ because there's no HF to boost, but you could use a psychoacoustic enhancer such as the very cost-effective Tantek module (available ready built or in kit form) to resynthesise the top end. This will also emphasise any background noise or clock breakthrough so use it sparingly and only on a decent analogue delay unit.

Tape echoes are available quite cheaply second hand but a good new one will cost you at least as much as a budget DDL. In some ways a tape device may give more pleasing results than a DDL because high frequency sounds such as those produced by synths can show up aliasing problems in budget DDLs which can be heard as an atonal warbling, not unlike the effect of a ring modulator, chirping away at the top end. Provided that a tape unit is mechanically sound and that the heads are not unduly worn, it should produce good results if it's looked after. This includes regular cleaning of the heads and tape guides, regular tape replacement and the odd nip round with the demagnetiser. Also clean the pinch roller when it gets dirty with the appropriate fluid for the job. You can make up your own tape loops but remember to use shiny backed tape if the system employs pressure pads and use only proper splicing tape. Also take care to measure the length of the tape loop exactly, otherwise it will run at the wrong tension and will either slip or break prematurely. Lastly, it's advisable to use standard play tape unless otherwise specified and remember to oil the motors occasionally.

Good models to look out for are old Roland Space Echoes, HH units and possibly some of the newer models of Watkins Copicat.

"...the price of the Yamaha R1000 is falling rapidly now that the new generation of products is on sale and it's capable of excellent results..."

Chorus and Flangers

As I have mentioned on many occasions, it is in the area of chorus and flanging that you can save a lot of money by using pedals without losing out much in the quality stakes. The opening comments regarding signal levels will almost certainly apply to these units but then some of the less expensive rack mounting units suffer from the same problem. Pedals do, of course, vary in quality from one make to another and flangers in particular can be noisy, so check out a few makes to see which performs best. Without wanting to seem like an advert for Japanese industry, you can't go wrong with Boss pedals though there are many other satisfactory alternatives, most of which are also Japanese. As the delay time used to create these effects is very short, the bandwidth and hence the brightness of such devices is rarely a problem. To create a stereo effect, it's easiest just to pan the direct signal to one side and the effected signal to the other, but if you can get hold of two pedals, try panning the straight signal to the centre with a different rate of effect to either side. It may be convenient to drive the chorus or flanger input from the foldback send of your mixer rather than from a post-fade auxiliary, because this gives you the opportunity to adjust the amount of direct signal without changing the amount of effected signal. If you have spare input channels to be used as returns, you could try connecting the pedal output to the mic input if you find yourself short of gain.

Compressors

I must confess that I've had very little success using pedals in this area as they don't tend to have sufficient flexibility for the job, and invariably give a dull, limp sound. If you're short of money (and who isn't?) go for an Accessit module or one of the Tantek units - it won't cost much more than a pedal and is infinitely more useful. Exactly the same comments apply to noise gates and again, Accessit or Tantek do sell cost effective units that really do perform well.

Reverb

This is really a very important treatment and you should buy the best that you can afford. Digital may be out of reach for a lot of enthusiasts but the price of the Yamaha R1000 is falling rapidly now that the new generation of products is on sale and it's capable of excellent results, albeit in mono. Cheap spring units are by and large a waste of time with very few exceptions but the Great British Spring by Bandive does perform very well, producing a warm yet bright sound with the minimum of twanging. If you can't run to one of these, try rigging up a speaker in a live room and mic up the result; it'll be much more rewarding than trying to get by with a cheap spring.

No matter what some adverts would lead you to believe, you can't get anything approaching a reverb effect from a conventional analogue or digital delay, and even multitapped delays sound more like echo than reverb though you can just about get away with them on vocals.

"...it is in the area of chorus and flanging that you can save a lot of money by using pedals without losing out much in the quality stakes."

Running Order

One of the most common questions about the use of effects is the order in which they should be connected. If you have enough sends and returns on your mixer, it's not really a problem but sometimes you may need to chain together effects to produce a specific treatment. There are no rules if what you have done sounds alright, but if you don't know where to start, the following guidelines might help.

Noise gates should always go right at the end of a chain as they then have the opportunity to remove noise caused by all the units preceding it in the chain and though this may sound obvious, it's surprising how many people get it wrong. The only exception to this rule may be when you are using the gate as an effect. An example of this may be gated reverb on drums to which you might want to add a little repeat echo in time with the track. In this case you would connect the reverb unit into the gate and then the output of the gate into the delay unit.

Chorus and delay are often used together and you get different but equally valid effects depending on the order in which you connect them. If the chorus is mono or a pedal unit with one effect and one dry output, try splitting the effect output and feeding the delayed version to one side and the undelayed chorus to the other side. It may add to the effect if you take the dry output and feed this to the centre of the stereo image, but this depends on the number of spare mixer channel inputs or effects returns that you have left.

Distortion producing devices should generally go at the front of the audio processing chain so that the harmonics so created can be acted upon by units further along the chain but remember, if you get the sound that you want by doing it another way, that's fine.

Equalisers may in theory be put anywhere in the chain but if you intend to use a lot of boost at any particular frequency, it may be as well to place the equaliser towards the end of the chain so that the boosted part of the spectrum is not eating up headroom in the following units. Though not strictly EQ devices, psychoacoustic enhancers should generally be connected at the end of a signal chain though they are equally useful when plugged into individual insert points to perk up snare or kick drums sounds that may lack cut.

Generally then it's a matter of common sense and if you think about it for a few minutes you should be able to predict what the outcome will be. For first class results, you do need first class equipment but if you choose your equipment carefully, the compromise may be far less serious than you originally thought.