The Post-Logic Saga Part 2

2025-04-25

It's been a bit longer since the previous entry into this saga, but I am happy to announce some degree of progress.

Pedals

When I found myself with a little extra cash left over a few months ago, I purchased 3 guitar pedals. Those pedals are:

I wanted these pedals to be able to do both harsh noise and distort my bass guitar. Logic contains in built amp and pedal sim plugins. My favourite distortion pedal is called the "grit" pedal in Logic, and I found out that it's modeled after the Proco Rat. In the end, I bought a clone of the Rat rather than the real thing, because firstly it was about £10 cheaper, and secondly I actually thought it sounded better from the demos I heard. After using it for a while I have to say I am very happy with this pedal. Cranking everything up it still retains a pretty clear bass register, which is what I liked about the grit pedal in logic. This allows for some super growly doom metal type tones. But recently I've been using less distortion, preserving the sort of bright pingy sound of round wounds played near the bridge, which I've found sounds great with some dissonant no-wave style hypnotic basslines.

The super fuzz I believe is a clone of the Boss DS-1. I had a DS-1 as a kid, and it's a classic sound so I figured I should own one. Sounds great on it's own, and also paired with the Black Rat. It also has a "boost" setting alongside the two distortion modes, which is pretty useful. It was also pretty cheap.

Finally, the random ass eq pedal was just the cheapest one I could find on reverb.com. I needed an EQ pedal for making harsh noise, being able to shape the tone going into your distortion I find is crucial for making good noise. It gets the job done, which is all I wanted. I don't tend to use it when hooking up my bass, but I may experiment more.

In the future, I do hope to pick up some more pedals. I'm thinking of looking into some of the weirder stuff from earthquaker devices.

I also purchased a cheap power supply, the Gokko pedalpower micro. This was a mistake, it introduces quite a lot of hum when chaining distortions. I should have bought a better isolated power supply. For now, it's fine. Not a top priority to replace, but in future I'm definitely going to upgrade, probably to a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2.

The Scuffed Zone

Ok so now I'm going to tell you about my setup. It's quite possibly the most scuffed thing ever invented by humans, but it technically works. I kinda love how stupid this setup is. Last night I watched this documentary "Blank City", (available on archive.org here). It's about the no-wave cinema movement in NYC from the late 70s into the 80s. I love no-wave music, but I wasn't aware that there was a no-wave cinema movement around at the same time. The level of DIY ethos, making movies for 0 budget. The documentary also touches on the no-wave music scene, and all of this was very inspiring to me. So I decided today to just try and put together anything I could to make some noises.

I have my bass guitar going into the Black Rat pedal, then a patch cable from that into this cheap 6 track mixer I bought off amazon. Then I have hydrogen, a foss drum machine program, running on my ThinkPad x220. The audio jack on my ThinkPad is broken, so I have a USB male to female 3.5mm jack, then a male 3.5mm to 6.25mm female, then a patch cable from that into the super fuzz on the boost setting, then another patch cable into the mixed. Since I still don't own an amp, everything from the mixer goes out into an old Bose Wave radio and CD player, which can also take audio input. Then I have a usb lav mic running from my thinkpad laying on the bed (this whole setup takes place on top of my mattress on the floor), which records everything into audacity.

Here's a really low res picture of the setup where you can barely see what's going on at all:

And here's what it sounds like:

As you can tell, this is actually surprisingly good. I mean, it definitely sounds like a DIY recording, but that's kind of the point of all this. Now when it comes to the additional elements of a song, I am pretty much able to do that too if I want to. Audacity comes with many inbuilt effects to post-process the audio (I actually used a little compression and trimmed the audio above), and any for additional pre-processing effects I can simply purchase more pedals. Overdubs are pretty easy to do with just audacity, so for example if I wanted to double track the bass, or add vocals or whatever that's very doable.

Collaboration

Recently, (by which I mean in the past year or so), I've come to realise that I don't think the tone of my voice is well suited for the sort of heavy and dissonant music I like to make. I also don't really like the process of writing lyrics, nor do I think I'm very good at it. I have a friend IRL who's got a much better voice for this sort of thing, and he's a much better lyricist than I am. I'm going to try and get him in on this, and hopefully collaborate in the future. He also plays guitar so who knows where that will lead to. The trade off with that being that recording a track becomes an event which I have to organise, rather than a burst of spontaneous creativity whenever it hits me alone. I'm very used to working alone on music, and I will probably continue to do that, but I do think I want to pursue collaboration more in the near future.

With this particularly scuffed setup, I am pretty much capable of recording an album without using logic, which I actually find artistically acceptable. It's satisfyingly low tech. I'll continue experimenting and refining the workflow, and make some more proof of concept tracks which I may or may not release on patreon. Post-logic is coming to fruition, step by step.