Jaak, just wanted to say this pedal is astounding. The amount of tools you have packed in here is really just insane. I recently received a preorder of another popular stereo lofi pedal cough and I was sadly let down by a couple of technical flaws with it and was unable to use it in my rig. The Other Guys’ heavily curated flavors of lofi sounds are very tasteful and cool, but with the Ribbons, you have provided a powerful toolset to create my own cool sounds. In that regard, I think Ribbons is the true success.
When I first heard about the latest revision of the Gen Loss it sort of broke my heart because it overlapped with Ribbons in numerous ways (Lo-Fi, Stereo, Tape Stop effect, etc.). I almost canceled the project all together. Hearing comments like this makes me glad I didn’t.
I’m grateful you picked one up and hope you enjoy the little world I created. Please let me know if you have any comments, questions, or issues! I’m always happy to help.
To be fair, the pedal sounds great and most users will probably never notice or be bothered by these things because it sounds good on guitar, synths, vocals, etc. but for use as a post-production effect on full mixes or drums, I found it to be unusable.
I also recently received my GL2, and I love many many things about the pedal, but I was disappointed with those design choices too.
They released a firmware update to preserve bass response and reduce the “doubling” effect but unfortunately the updated version retains the doubling, just at a smaller degree (more “flangey”, in their words), which is still problematic for full mixes and drums. They refer to this as the result of latency but the doubling effect is still present at 100% dry, so I’m not sure I understand why latency is the appropriate explanation for it.
Like Kinoplex said, the pedal is incredible for many uses, but I’m bothered by the decision to not allow the user to have a phase-coherent signal at 100% wet if they want to.
I’ve been thinking about swapping my GL2 for a Ribbons so this might be the place to ask:
@jaakjensen is the Ribbons suitable for line-level signals, and would I be able to send a stereo signal through it at 100% wet without getting any flanging/chorusing type effects? Thank you!
@d_hansen
I can tell you that Ribbons is perfect for line-level signals like outboard effects for full mixes, etc. No perceivable latency, doubling, flanging, etc… it’s got a bit of a sharper learning curve than the Gen Loss, but the manual explains how to navigate the settings. Get a Ribbons, you won’t regret it.
Hi @d_hansen - welcome to the forum and thanks for posting! And thanks @Kinoplex for the kind words!
Ribbons uses a different pitch shifting algorithm and doesn’t have this issue. I knew early on that people (myself included) would want to run full mixes through it so preserving transients was really important to me.
It’s also suitable for line-level - it can handle up to +2dBU input level, which is a nice balance between line level and consumer level. Ribbons works great for all instrument level signals but you might have to turn down your input signal a tiny bit if running a loud synthesizer or audio interface directly into it.
My personal unit is basically married to my audio interface.
I’d love to have something that allows more depth of editing than the GL2, so this is totally worth it for me.
that’s great to know!
amazing, just what I was hoping I could do. in fact, when reading some of your development comments regarding saturation I realized that it would be fantastic to stick the Ribbons in my always-on outboard master chain before my Analog Heat and let the Heat take care of my saturation for me in the analog domain. very excited to know that this will work out.
edit: another thing that I have trouble with when using the GL2 is that amplitude fluctuations are bound to wow/flutter, so I can’t really introduce pitch fluctuations without them. @jaakjensen from the manual it seems like Ribbons doesn’t do amplitude fluctuations but I thought I’d double-check anyway.
The Wow and Flutter parameters on Ribbons don’t have any amplitude fluctuations but the Dropouts parameter does (in-addition to pitch modulation). I’m toying around with the idea of giving the option to turn the amplitude modulation off on the Dropouts parameter using MIDI in the next update, just to give a little more flexibility. This setting would be persistent and would stay set between power cycles or it could be saved into a preset - so Preset 7 could have the volume dropouts but Preset 8 could have them turned off.
The volume fluctuations are used to add some stereo imaging to the dropouts (they’re different on the left and right), which was a common request last fall.
I just wanted to hop on here to share my adoration for Ribbons. I have a lot of pedals and love them all for various reasons, but Ribbons is straight up my favorite effect pedal. It’s so flexible, feature packed and most importantly I just love the way it sounds. I’m blown away that this thing basically the work of one guy. How is that possible? Even a feature like saturation, which was added after the fact, sounds awesome and is deeply musical. I wish more people could get their hands on this thing because it’s truly brilliant. @jaakjensen I can tell Ribbons was a labor of love for you. Thank you for sharing it with us. It has been such a source of inspiration for me and I can’t wait to see what you make next.
Even though Ribbons didn’t win an Emma, it was nice to see it get so much attention yesterday. It probably had a more prominent place in the awards ceremony than pedals that did win! Whoever that guy was who was agitating for attention for Ribbons did a great job.
