Effects - Filters

Zvex Seek Wha

Type of pedal : 8 tweakable filters in a row moving in a rhythmic fashion.

Description : This is a very special pedal. It has eight set filters in a row and then a tempo knob which dictates how fast the sound should move through the eight wahs. This is even clarified by diodes showing how the filter is set. Dark if very low and bright red if its open. To set different of rhythms you can choose between an eight, six of or four wah sequence. Four doubling the tempo of the eight and six giving it a slightly waltzy feel. Setting every second one completely open and the next one closed makes it a very bubbly tremolo. According to the Z-vex website it is like a sequencer controlling a mellow band pass filter…I have never heard that so that I´ll take his word for it.

I have used this a lot. To me every pedal that can add a bit of randomness to the sonic environment is very welcome at Roth Händle. It can make an ebow line turn into an unexpected synth. I have used it on drummachine hihats doubletracking it so that the rhythm becomes more fractured and disoriented. I have used it on white noise crashes so that they duck in and out of the production. I have used on echoey backing vocals creating almost supremes like rhythms. I have used it on just about every instrument but bass….

This is one of my all time favorites…I know a lot of people are annoyed that you can´t set the tempo exact but if that kind of stuff annoys you then it is probable that you work with computers and that means that you can timestretch what you are recording and get it right...Pineforest did that on Panamarenko with the Logan string Melody…making it open on the first beat of the bar and then closing rhythmically over the chord.

Schaller Rotosound

Type of pedal : Swirley German Leslie imitator.
Controls: Speed and Intensity
Used by: Kraftwerk

Description : This was one of the first effects I bought with the intention of ” I don't know what to do it right now but if I build a studio some day I will probably use it on a record someday ”.

The Schaller Rotosound is obviously supposed to mimic the sound of a Leslie cabinet doing it's thing but it sounds actually pretty different. The difference is that where a Leslie has a constant movement as it is going round and round the Schaller does a fast movement and then is quiet and then a fast movement again. And the difference in speed is actually the space between the fast movements. This isn't really an issue as I have a real Leslie in the studio, which means that one can evaluate the Schaller Rotosound for what it is.

This is one of those effects that you can't really use that much but when you get it on the right instrument with the right amount and in the right spot it really shines. The sound is pretty oily and twirley without entering the realms of Flangers and Choruses. As you might have guessed I am pretty fond of it and it gets a lot of usage. It doesn't end up on everything but at least it is tried out a lot. Sounds great in combination with other sixties type sounds like the Sitar guitar. It also works great for those ” Echoes ” and Sigur Ros like pings. A lot of the time I use the Casio SK-5s Piano with it to for a kind of weird submarine sonar feel.

Olle

Frostwave Funk-a-duck Resonant filter

Type of pedal : Resonant envelope filter
Controls: See Picture for details.
Used by: The Avalanches.

Description : This is one of the true workhorses at Roth Händle. I bought this on tour in London with Geller without even hearing it. I just had this gut feeling that this could be something special. Also the hand carved serial number was 002 so I guessed someone pretty close to the family must have parted with it.

This is one of those pedals that never gets truly unplugged. Together with the Big Briar Ring Modulator, The Z vex pedals and the new Sonic Alienator these pedals pretty much make out the back bone of the studios effect section. Sure I use a lot of different filters for different stuff but this pedal seems to turn up in just about everything I do. And the reason for this is pretty simple…It sounds amazing.

I have used this on just about every instrument imaginable. Either sweeping manually as I go along or using it in a fixed setting. You can choose between High pass and Low pass. The Resonance in the filter means that you can get those Massive Attack/Björk-like rumbly bass movements or high ear shattering oscillator madness. But what the Funk-a-duck really does is that it gives every sound a kind of credibility.

While recording Panamarenko with Pineforest Crunch we used it on the Superior organ (more or less a Stylophone with keys). This turned up on the track Slowly (second verse). Mats playing it through a delay and I was tweaking the filter in real time and the filter made the little toy organ sound more like the Mini Moog than the Mini Moog usually does. With Geller and Nanook of the North I have used it mostly on drum machines. One of my favourite moments is on the Nanook song Hey Fragile where we used a drum machine going through it and it made these weird water drop rhythms.

Nowadays I find that I use a lot on acoustic instruments when using drum machines to kind of make the gap between electronica and acoustics a bit tighter. I often use it on the high pass setting on shakers and tambourines to make them smaller and buzzier. With Celestine we have used it on guitars and organs to make them step out more in the mix.

The funk-a-duck is pretty random and it will sound different depending on settings and the volume you are sending into it but to me this is all part of the fun. The whole randomness makes it so much more interesting. The one thing you can be sure of is that it going to sound completely different from what you sent into it but it will sound great coming out the other end. Not necessarily what you were looking for at the moment but still…pretty marvellous.

Paia Envelope Follower

Dod Envelope filter FX-25

Type of pedal : Simple Envelope filter.
Controls: Range, sensitivity
Used by: Dandy Warhols, Limp Bizkit, Radiohead and Korn.

Description : This was the first Envelope filter I bought. I The circumstances kind of made it simple. I was in a pawnshop with Jim Warren in Los Angeles (Radiohead & Peter Gabriels live engineer and producer for Pineforest Crunch's ill-fated Watergarden album). When I spotted the little green beat-up pedal and asked the clerk to see it Jim passed by and mentioned that Radioheads used one of those on electric guitars.

Said and done. It cost me 25 dollars and once again I had bought a piece of equipment I wasn't sure of. Reading these descriptions it seems like a reoccurring theme that I buy stuff that I don't really know what I am going to use it for but I later figure out and it becomes an important part of my set-up.

It actually took me until I got back home and plugged my Oberheim DX through the Envelope filter and instantly recognised the kind of dirty filtered rhythmic sound. Wait a minute…this sounds like cheap low-grade hip-hop! Adding a delay made it sound all cool and interesting…(remember this was way back in 1998) …after that it felt like the floodgates had just burst open. The envelope filter was used on just about everything. Drummachines were the standard with Andreas & Jag, Reminder used it on distorted basslines…I tried it almost everything. On an early Pineforest Demo prior to the Panamarenko sessions we even used it on the lead vocals.

So what does it sound like…It is a volume sensitive dynamic filter, The louder you play the more the filter will open. This means that you can go from low rumbly mumbly sounds and then by pulling the volume up the filter can open so that you can hear the original sound almost (well…) unaffected.

Filter sweeps are the cornerstones of dance music and techno so for me to all of a sudden have access to a similar sound was really interesting. I have never been a big fan of funk or 70´s r& b so I instinctively wanted to get away from the auto wah aspect of it. I realised pretty early on that I couldn't turn Reminder into Massive Attack or turn Mats Lundgren (bassplayer of PFC) into Bootsy Collins soundwise with a green beat up envelope filter from Dod. But there were other avenues to explore.

One thing that I really liked to do (and still like to do) is to pull more ambient loops like mellotron flutes or the Solina Stringensemble through the filter to create more movement in the sound.

So without exaggeration the DOD envelope filter was a real eye opener to me… So that is how they make that sound . Do I use it nowadays..? Well I am sad to tell you that my original Dod FX-25 disappeared on tour together with a Schaller tremolo. I bought a newer model for the Deadwood Forest Sessions but it doesn't sound and feel the same. And another thing is that since I bought my first Envelope Filter I have bought a couple of other ones as well. But I actually pull it out occasionally for a small Guitar passage or drummachine annoyance…The last time I used it was for the Celestine song Between bedtime and Sunrise (the bridge sections) and for some Blanc stuff.

Electro Harmonix Q-tron

Boss Autowah

Electro Harmonix Speech synthesizer

Type of pedal : Wah wah type pedal but with built in fuzzbox and formantfilter.
Controls: Drive
Description : When you start buying effect pedals or instruments you tend to use the equipment you have for everything. I started out with an eq pedal and a delay and realised that there were enormous possibilities in those two pedals. When you get a third pedal they start to become more specialised. I used go on about “ the right sound in the right place “…. Now I am more inclined to say the wrong sound in the right place. If everything is perfect there is a big possibility that something is terribly wrong. I tend to use all my pedals a fair deal but I have become increasingly picky about what I use them for so I minimise the amount of time that I spend working the actual sound, I just want to get the sound I am looking for.

The EH- talking pedal is a weird one. If you search the net it seems like it is almost always brushed of as a weird fluke pedal. When Andreas and me started messing with it, Andreas used it live on his acoustic guitar but what that mainly did was that it looked for feedback frequencies with wonderful precision. It didn't work out too great. So what does it sound like…well it is more in the region of ieey-eeiy-yoy-yoy sounds than your traditional wah giving it a more “ vocal “ sound. According to my good friend Anders Wilhelm this is a formant filter working the frequencies of the human vowel sounds…

Is it useable…? Well yes I would say so because I feel like I have found an instrument that matches the Talking pedal perfectly. Electric pianos. They seem to pair up perfectly giving the tone a kind of weird grittiness. I am not too much for wah-type sounds so I usually use it without using the pedalpart, just as a weird distorting eq.

Of course this would work with any instrument but my favourite are our old friends…the electric pianos.

The first band that I did this with was the French masters of melancholy, Blanc. I played it too Fender Rhodes Mainman Hugo Törntorp who loved the sound in the mix but couldn't grasp how something that distorted and twisted still could retain some kind of tonal quality. Since then I have used it on amongst other things a Tremoloed Pianet with Johan Moraeus, but also on some minor guitar parts with Celestine.

One good/bad thing with this pedal is that it is really heavy and sturdy…Not your favourite perhaps for a transatlantic cheapo flight where every kilo counts but otherwise wonderful and reliable.

Boss Graphic Equalizer GE-6

Type of pedal : A six band graphic equalizer
Controls: Six faders for different frequencies.
Description : This was the first stompbox I bought. I wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to do with it but it made sense to have an eq to have lying around when you are recording. But pretty soon I started using it. I never got into using this as a ” true ” eq as in eq-ing out unwanted frequencies and hums…It is in all honesty too blunt for that but what I started to do was to pull loops, guitars and vocals through it to create radio-like small sounds. And it is very effective for that. So I think it definitely is one of those pedals that are very price worthy. You can probably find one for next to nothing and if you get into t you'll be using it a lot. A wonderful lo-fi toy. Apparently it is a really early Boss pedal and therefor a collectors item…well well…

I think mine is pretty old as it has the most annoying early Boss feature. The fact that you don't know whether or not it is on or not. The led flashes when you press the button but it doesn't stay on if the effect is on. Most annoying.

MXR stereo 10 band Eq

Mini Moog, Yamaha CS-60 & Korg MS-10