Fairfield Electronics The Accountant question:
Can someone help me understand in layman's terms the ratio and pad switches? It seems like ratio is the amount of compression, and pad acts like an attenuator, but I'm not really that sure. Thanks!
Edit: woops I meant fairfield circuitry!
Posted Oct 3, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC · edited
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Yup, that's about it. Pad is actually short for passive attenuator device.
Oh wow I had no idea that was an acronym. Thanks! I just ordered a few pedals from them, and am excited to put them on my board!
Which did you get besides the Accountant? I have that and the Shallow Water and love them both.
Shallow water and barbershop! Can you tell me your thoughts on the shallow water? Where do you out it in your chain?
I had a Barbershop too and, of course, am thinking I shouldn't have sold it.
And sure! There's a bit of a learning curve in terms of how the controls interact with one another. The LPG is the tricky one, IMO. Since it's a low pass filter and gate, it controls a lot of variables at once. It's dependent on/reactive to your playing dynamics. Maxed out, it's pretty much bypassed. The lower you set it, the darker/murkier/more choked your sound will be, even more so with a soft touch. Digging in more will yield more brightness/clarity/sustain and more audible modulation. Truly unique.
The Damp control is awesome backed all the way down as the random pitch shifts become fairly abrupt. More standard chorus-y sounds are more easily found with the mix at ~12:00-2:00. Don't be afraid to try various combinations of Rate/Depth/Damp settings, as there's a lot to be had just within those 3 controls.
Right now I have one od/fuzz and a delay in front of it and two drives/another delay after. Fuzz, etc. running into the Shallow Water can sound flanger-ish, whereas drives after it allow the pitch modulation to come through a bit more clearly/prominently. I like it's effect on delay repeats. It makes sense to run the SW at the end to add it's magic to your entire chain, though this video makes one hell of an argument for running it early on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYfAYBSkcjc&t=2s