use a volume pedal as an expression pedal via Audio/CV

ring's icon

Hi!

My idea is to take advantage of the superb quality of an ernie ball volume pedal but to use it as an universal foot controller.

I would send signal out of my RME fireface 400, wire it to the volume pedal and back, and analyse the signal again to get its status.
Pretty similar to CV - with the difference that this setup doesn't need to fit to any CV hardware (+/-5V).

Does anybody has expereince with that?

What about LATENCY and RESOLUTION?

Thanks,
ring

Andrew Pask's icon

The Ernie Ball pedals are nice, but they have a kind of logarithmic curve on them when you measure their output with peakamp~. You could tweak it of course. I usually use a 1k sine wave for measuring.

A better bet for this is a pedal like the Roland EV-5. It has a kind of flat response. Also it is cheaper, lighter, smaller and less cable hassle than the EB.

As far as latency and resolution go, I found that my ankle was the bottleneck. Try changing a MIDI cc value by 1 with your foot.

In the end though, I dumped the use of all the audio ins and outs and now I'm using an eobody2 USB.But the audio thing worked really well for years.

-A

ring's icon

So you really used it?! Wow, would you please be so kind to send me a patcher that I could start from?

I'll use the Ernie Ball generally as a real analoge volume pedal together with my rhodes. I just thought it could be cool to also have the possibility to use it for example as a wah pedal...

The eowave thing sounds pretty cool! I bookmarked it and will have a closer look later...

thank you so far

ring

Andrew Pask's icon
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

There's basically nothing to it.

jhindsight's icon

sorry to bump an old thread but i've got a roland ev-5 and am wondering how to use it in this manner. andrew mentions sending a 1k cycle~ out to the pedal then monitoring the input but the ev-5 just has one output lead so how do you make that connection?

any help would be great, thanks

Thomas Smith's icon

I'm bringing up an old thread here...I'm using Andrew's patch to send audio out of my Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 interface to a Roland EV 5 and back in again (via this adaptor, recommended by Jeff Kaiser on here) but can't make it work - not getting any numbers. Is there anything else I should be doing?