I received mine today. This is a very feature-packed pedal, but I really wish you had allowed more control over the noise and crackles.
Two things I miss the most:
A low-pass filter to shape the hiss / crackles, probably 6db/oct would be enough. You might as well make it a dj-style combination of low/high pass, but I personally would probably only cut the highs. A more “lively” noise would also be welcome, as the hiss seems quite static compared to for example the Generation Loss mk2.
Control the interval/frequency of the crackles. I think they attract too much attention, and it sounds unrealistic to me at this rate. The crackles are also very similar, which doesn’t help.
In general I think the hiss/crackles are just not very realistic to me. To make them usable I close the available LPF quite a bit, but since that filters everything, it means that all of my sounds are always very filtered, which is limiting the usefulness of the pedal.
I wish you had made the control over hiss and crackles volume independent. You can have soft hiss, or soft crackles but not a combination of both. In the middle, either the hiss or the crackles are too loud for me.
I hope you can consider controlling these things at least via MIDI if there is no room in on the device.
Thank you for the critique. We haven’t made any updates to the noise parameter since its inception and I suppose you’re right - it’s a bit vanilla compared to most of Ribbons other settings, which have more nuance. The idea was that you could use the filters, wow, flutter, and crinkle to shape the noise.
I’d prefer to come up with a more thoughtfully curated noise setting rather than add bells and whistles to change it. I can add this to our list of things to investigate for a future update.
@jaakjensen
Hi, just found this before creating another topic. Hope you see it.
Got my grey Ribbons and had now a but time to dive in.
I’m really a fan of noise aspects in pedals and although i think Ribbons is my favorite overall lo-fi pedal, the noise implementation could be better. At least for my taste.
I agree, the right side of the noise knob, these pops could sound a bit better. But i think they are still useable.
My main point is the volume aspect. I really like a mix between noise and pops. But if i do it, it’s really loud cause mix and volume are connected on that knob.
So my suggestion would be: make the knob a mix knob only and a volume control as a secondary feature like the Resonance and make up gain on the green page. I think that would be helpful.
If you still wanted some kind of on/off in the primary knob functions, the absolute min/max positions could still be off, the 100% on either side would just start right a notch above the min/max positions. 50/50 at 12.
Just an idea, what i think would be cool. Maybe you have better ideas.
I think we’ll turn the NOISE control into a straight forward volume control for the noise and then the RESERVED hidden option will cycle between a couple different tasty flavors of noise. Probably the best way to use that extra knob.
How does that sound? If that’s agreeable I will add it to the list for firmware v2.1