Very happy customer here in Melbourne , australia! Just been using my Ribbons all afternoon with my partner, couldn’t turn the thing off… I really wanted a loopy, degreded, delay-ey type pedal that is easy to use with live guitar playing/composition, and as an owner for 4 C#B pedals, have not been able to get a totally satisfactory live workflow with any them, except the C#####r… The Ribbons answered my questions and more! Why aren’t there more ‘mainstream’ demos of it online?? It’s fan’fricken’fantastic!! As soon as I plugged it in, I managed to get fantastic, warbly, lo-fi guitars sounds, like Alex Chilton’s ‘like flies on sherbert’ or even some of Kim Salmon, Royal Trux/Howlin Hex or Sebadoh type stuff AND, it then does INCREDIBLE loopy stuff, like that track Poledo off Dinosaur Jr’s 'your living all over me! Forget a Knobs demo, you need to put one of these in the hands of Lou Barlow or Kevin Shields Jim O’Rourke or even William Basinski (lol!) let them demo it! Anyway, this is on my second live rig, and that’s the key, this is a perfect for live performance!
I have one question - the ‘lo fi’ preset went a bit off it’s own tangent after I played the the T1/T2 knobs, is there an easier way to reset the ‘preset’ settings, like maybe hold down both footwitches, than instead of reloading the preset from scratch?
Thanks, much respect, well done! A great piece of pedal engineering!
If you’ve overwritten any of the presets there is an option to reset them all to factory presets in the manual.
But from what you’re describing it sounds like you want a quick fix to reset a preset if you haven’t saved any changes to it? If that’s the case, reloading the preset is the quickest and only way to do it. If you’re on lofi preset and you mess with the T1 and T2 knobs, the quickest way is to either try and recall where those two knobs were and move them back, or to cycle through the presets and reload the lofi preset. It would be even faster if you had a midi controller that would send a program change to that preset.
Having used the pedal for quite a while, I feel like a command to quickly “undo” knob changes like that beyond the preset function would lead me to making more mistakes.
The presets menu will default to the last preset you loaded. So all you would do is long press the push button and then tap Touch when the slot lights up. I don’t think that’s any harder than a different button combo would be.
In the interest of not creating a new thread, I want to jump onto this thread to lavish praise onto Jaak and everyone at Kinotone. I’m a second-time owner of Ribbons and a regretful non-owner of Sparks (until the next drop, at least!). I won’t go into the details of my selling of the first Ribbons to fund travel: this fact is only notable because I’m lucky to have firmware 2.0 in my current unit, which is an amazing upgrade.
What I love about every Kinotone module is both the desire to be relevant to the market—people love random modulation and stereo sorcery—and resistance to well-trod interpretations. For example, the amazing new mp3 degrader scratches some of my itch for Lossy, even as I know that it’s not the whole package, but, more importantly, it distinguishes itself from Lossy. I feel less tempted because I recognize that the module in Ribbons is its own interpretation.
More praise for 2.0: magnetic dance improvements and compression/saturation switching on the pedal. I’m one of those guitarists who has insanely remained agnostic to compression until now—20 years after I started playing. I’m running magnetic dance (on the setting that makes 4 loops that aren’t repitched but merely reshuffled) into the heaviest compression, and it’s the most inspiring odd loop+evolving accompaniment I’ve ever experienced.
This leads me to the point of this procrastinatory screed while at work: how does the compressor in Sparks compare to RIbbons. I realize the inspiration is the same, but how does they compare to each other in their feel? I’m amazed at the ability of Ribbons loops to duck under my accompaniment: how does Sparks compare in its ability to handle multiple guitar tracks and interpret their levels as perfectly as Ribbons?
My ulterior motive is that I’m tempted by the Chase Bliss Clean. But I’m compelled by Sparks’ audio rate capabilities and assignable envelope.
Apologies for any overwriting, and thank you again for being absolute gents/ballers.
I don’t know how to compare the compressors, because in Ribbons it’s a one knob deal, whereas with Sparks it’s more of a situation where you can set up the pedal to work as a compressor, and if you do that you can have control over various parameters of the compressor. In theory they could be set up to sound the same, but I haven’t tried that myself, and it sounds like you have a specific sound/feel that I’m not sure I could identify in my own setup.
I don’t even know why I went into all of that, when all I really wanted to say was that every time I watch a Clean demo and I like the sound, I think “ah! but I can already do that with Sparks!” The “Physics” switch on Clean seems needlessly obscure. I prefer having the actual control over modulation that Sparks provides.
Sparks has the key ingredient of every compressor: an envelope follower, which comes in 3 different, selectable, “flavors”, which can be assigned to lower the output of the master volume control.
As commented above, while Kinotone’s take is undoubtedly interesting and tonally pleasing, I feel that I would to have a better control over all of a compressor’s parameters.
From this perspective, and also because it’s a stereo unit, I would consider the CBA clean…
(which reminds me that I have an idle FMR Really Nice Compressor which I could put to good use )
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