Dear friend and compadre, Karim Merlin, loaned me a guitar pedal. He recently purchased an Earthquaker Levitation pedal, which uses delay, tone and atomosphere to mix a versatile reverb with lots of space to explore. Since I am moved to play all the harmonics through synthesized sound, a guitar pedal gives me a chance to experiment with routing hardware effects through Ableton. I was very excited to try it out.

The wind left my sails when I YouTubed for some supportive info and learned that, in order to get the signal from my ukelele/or vocal mic through the pedal into Ableton and out to auditory cortexes, I need a reamp box between the pedal and the sound card, and a preamp box between the soundcard and mixing board. This has to do with matching the signal out and the signal in to the same impedance. Signal routing is the great labrynth of synthesized sound in my mind. Signals can be sound energy, electrical energy, can be boosted, attenuated, colored, and fed back onto and through each other. And, when it comes to hardware, signals must match somehow. Something to do with the energy of the signal. This part eludes my understanding so far, and I am eager to grok it! And what better way then to simply play.

The NI Komplete 6 soundcard I use has phantom power, which amplifies the signal in certain microphones. The Behringer mixing board has several ways to elevate the signal. Perhaps these will suffice? When I ran the electric uke signal through The Levitation there was a little bit of signal and a whole lot of noise. I tried playing with it within Ableton to see if I could make the noise blend, but no. A vocal microphone sounded the best, but wasn’t a sound I wanted to cultivate. The YouTube guy may be right. I need to build an empire to use pedals through Ableton.

So I end up back in Ableton, playing with all their reverb configurations and making a few of my own.

And I am still wanting a few more 3D knobs and sliders. I am anticipating that my next big sound love may come my way this week via Moogfest!