I’ve posted before about brick wall limiters, and had some success with a few dynamics plug-ins on the Mod Duo X. However this all seems very material dependant, and currently I’m trying to replicate a Korg SDD delay, where if you push the feedback to 100, it hits a limited level, and then the signal just breaks up without getting louder and destroying your speakers.
I’ve set up the Bollie Delay, with a knob set to allow 100% feedback, then I’ve placed various limiters after it and none of them limit. I just don’t get it. Possibly it’s something about that delay plug-in, but my mixer shows insane levels coming out of the MOD despite any limiting I place after the delay.
Some limiters are just not sufficient. My levels in the Mod tend to be -25 ish, so I need something which can clamp a signal down before it goes above say -20. Some never kick in.
I posted a sample pedalboard, and it indicated I was using Beta Plug-ins, perhaps that is my issue. However I tried a few different limiters on this delay set to 100 and they just straight up did not limit the audio coming out of the MOD.
The Mod is digital, so I feel like some pedals should be ‘tools’ not replicas of real pedals. Give me a limiter with one knob - set that level and anything that goes in will never surpass that level!
Yes, that’s reading 746DB’s coming out of that delay, and also coming out of that limiter, which is clearly not doing it’s job. The second limiter indicates -9DB, but the sound actually cracked up and broke the pedalboard sending massive levels out of the MOD. I had to reboot it.
I tried the Calf Limiter - but it’s another one with zero documentation on what the controls represent. I hate that the most about the MOD environment - each plug-in uses its own calibration for every parameter. 50%, or .5, or 64 could all mean the same thing, with different plug-ins. I guess that is to be expected, but that is also where lack of documentation is the Achilles Heal of the Mod environment.
I tried using it, but no matter the settings, it only seemed to limit at zero, nothing below that, which is too hot for me.
Possibly if I understood how it worked, I could get it to do something useful.
I have come to believe that there is something inherently wrong with my pedalboard set up, because I’ve tried different delays, and different limiters, but nothing gets limited, and things blow up with the feedback on full - causing serious issues and red lights coming out of the MOD. So - no idea how to proceed with this concept, and now feel like I need to re-test older pedalboards to see if they are limiting as they should.
I just found the “One Knob Brickwall Limiter” - and it works exactly as advertised. I wonder why I don’t see it in the Plug-ins shop on the website? Does that mean it’s Beta?
it is beta yes, part of a plugin collection I started but did not finish.
For limiters I like x42 Digital Peak Limiter but we do not have that on the MOD store yet, it is somewhat of a new plugin. @x42 indicated to me that it would likely not be so useful for guitarists, so I did not try to package it, but it would have been the perfect thing for your case I believe.
So what is the situation with Beta plug-ins? What is the process by which they are no longer Beta? Is that some kind of internal testing by the Mod team? Do most stay Beta and ‘use at your own risk’, or do most of them get tested, updated and become part of the regular store?
The intention is to push the plugins that recently got added to beta into stable.
Our big issue was that we initially populated the beta with plugins we did not want to use, just as a way to be able to test all the available ones.
So very soon we will cleanup most of the beta contents, or at least hide them (to not break compatibility with shared pedalboards).
The ones that remain should be considered “on the way to be stable once we fix all issues and give it some documentation”, with of course some testing period.
When that happens we can start to use beta as it really should have been to begin with - a short collection of plugins that are mostly stable but are still in the final phase of verification, testing and fixing.
Thanks for the info. I was reading the beta thread about this but still didn’t fully understand. I have used beta plug-ins without fear because I always assumed they would be out of beta within 6 months or so. But I guess it’s hit and miss. I also assume the creators need to fix whatever the Mod team finds during testing.
well the Duo is 10 years old, so a bit older in comparison. and back then guitarists were the focus.
I really wouldn’t image to have mod-host, mod-ui and the rest of the stack running all self-contained (plus also under Windows).
So with MOD Desktop now being a thing, plus Duo X too, I think DPL1 makes sense on the platform.
regarding Beta plug-ins. Once I’ve added a plug-in to my pool, there is no easy way to know if it is in beta. Is there some way beta plug-ins can be tracked? I’m sure I downloaded beta stuff ages ago, and perhaps I should trim them out of pedalboards for consistency sake, but I don’t see any indication that I have beta plug-ins.
In the web gui, for each plugin you aren’t sure if that’s a beta or stable plugin, you have to press the information icon and then click “See Online”: in that page you’ll find the Beta sticker.
I’m not aware of other ways to identify them, but I opened a thread proposing the request for some improvement in this area (searching local pedalboards for specific plugins).
Thanks for the tip. Indeed they should just have the word “beta” somewhere clearly in the GUI - where you select the plug-ins. Just like they do for “trial”.
probably still not all that helpful, but here’s the documentation on the Calf suite of plugins (on the Limiter page). Definitely cleared some stuff up for me:
That is super useful. I wish all the plug-ins I want to use had clear documentation. Some have knobs with a label which I understand, but then in practice, don’t see them doing what I thought they should be doing.
That is something that we want to tackle soon. Although we may need some help from the community for that. For now, we would need to start by mapping. Do you have any list already or suggestions on how could we all map this stuff?
