I’ll second that pillow idea, I use a big beach towel folded over a few times to get the right size to slip into the lid of the pedalboard. They don’t shift an inch in transit

The #1 Echo is a very simple digital delay, it won’t noticably colour your sound be it from a mic or your preamp, it’s a very straight forward hi-fidelity repeat.

If your acoustic has a preamp I’d recommend putting the output of that through the #1 Echo and then into an acoustic guitar amplifier, mic the amp up as well your acoustic and mix the two together to taste. This will give you the best possible sound in a studio situation.

I’ve gone and looked it up and either one of us could be right, depending on whether it’s a latching relay or not. I assumed they’d be latching as you use latching mechanical footswitches for your standard bypass, but your theory sounds more sensible as it’s like an extra feature; if the power goes out the pedal automatically bypasses itself so you can keep playing.

And I agree with the relay colouring your tone just as much as a switch does, but as soon as you say something isn’t true-bypass many-a-tone-freak will stick their head back in the sand.

Well, the best way to see if your pedals are true-bypass or not is to turn them to bypass, and remove the power jack, and see if you still have signal. If not, it’s not true-bypass.

Some pedals using relays (like the Behringer ‘Vintage’ series, which are just plain EHX copies) might still give you signal, the way to check these is to turn the pedal on, remove the power, then hit the bypass switch, if you aint got signal, you aint got true-bypass.

The compression induced by the tube pre is really obvious there, sounds much smoother and more polished than the solid state pre you used.

As for noise there’s not much you can do, you should however remember that low frequency tracks (like bass guitar) will always sound noisier than others as there simply is nothing much but noise higher up in the spectrum. In my experience all you need to do to mask this is have a high-mid track, be it vocal, guitar, cello, anything in that range, play simultaniously.

Here’s an example; http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14392951/In_the_Middle_of_the_Night.mp3

Loads of noise in the first bar when it’s just bass (it’s one of my tracks so I’m allowed to slag it off xD) but when other instruments come in at the start of the second bar; guitar, synth and BVs, the noise is barely noticable. By bar 4 when the drums come in you wouldn’t be able to tell there’s any noise there at all! And remember, those other tracks contain just as much noise! I used the same microphone and the same pre for all of the tracks, and all instruments are played through the same amp. With the obvious exception of the drums, which are sequenced, because 1-mic drum takes rarely go well.

Feeding it a line-level signal is unlikely to cause much upset as far as impedance is concerned, just so long as the output impedance of your DI box or whatever you’re sending into the preamp is lower than the input impedance of the EHX pre, which it will be.

The only time you really need to worry about impedance is when going from pre to power amp, or chaining power amps, or connecting speakers. The difference it makes with low level signals going into high impedance preamps is negligible.

Also, the output of a DI box is mic level, not line level, so going;

Bass (or synth or anything!) -> DI -> EHX pre

is absolutely fine.

Is there any advantage to be gained from chaining two of these pedals?

I built a pedal with an XO-LiBMP sized box with three knobs and two footswitches, it was two chained octave-up circuits (for footswitchable one/two octaves up), but it just wouldn’t work, I even went the extra mile of simulating it in software and it worked, but nevermind, that’s old news! I was wracking my brains thinking of what I could use the enclosure for, cuz it looks PIMP! Anyways, I ended up with the simple idea of two LPB-1’s. I don’t already have one, and I’ve seen loads of reviews like this one saying that they don’t simply boost your signal, but improve your whole sound, filling it out with extra harmonics (and all that stuff!). So, has anyone chained these before? If so, what does it sounds like with two in series?

A lot of love for the English Muff’n goin on here, is it really that good? What sorta sounds can u get from it? Is it a potential Big Muff Pi upgrade?