Mods for the Easy vibe?

[Mark Abbott]

I built an Easyvibe many years ago and never completed it. I found the pedal to sound quite pleasing. Does anyone have any advice on interesting mods to this pedal or opinions on his pedal?

Thanks for our help.

Yours Sincerely

Mark Abbott 

[Mark Hammer]

The thing with "vibe" effects is that there really aren't many mods you can do beyond the dry+wet/wet-only and wet-blend amount.  Regeneration sounds negligible or awful with vibe units.  Hiking the speed up to the audio range for quasi-ring mod effects provides no discernible advantage to doing the same mod with just about any other modulation pedal (flanger, chorus, tremolo, phaser).  And once you start monkeying around with cap values, you run the risk of losing the desired Univibe tone.

I completely understand the B.U.M. (blind urge to mod) syndrome, but in this case you'd be "gilding the lily".  Vibe units want essentially 4 things: speed, sweep width, blend, vibrato/univibe and mayyyyyybe manual offset.

[John Lyons]

My only mod for the univibe is to build the NEovibe or whichever univibe clone more closely based on the univibe.

My reasoning
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=54665.0

John

[Bucksears]

Constantin has a volume control mod for this, as well as an 'improved fidelity', but I havent' bothered with them yet.

- Buck

[Andre]

R.G. has  a Leslie style ramp/up down LFO, adapted for the Easyvibe at his website www.geofex.com.

I have not tried it, but I think it will give some sweet sounds.
I built my easyvibe in a wah shell, so I can do the ramp up/down by foot and the ramping sounds very leslie like.

André

[Mark Hammer]

R.G. has  a Leslie style ramp/up down LFO, adapted for the Easyvibe at his website www.geofex.com.

I have not tried it, but I think it will give some sweet sounds.
I built my easyvibe in a wah shell, so I can do the ramp up/down by foot and the ramping sounds very leslie like.

André

Boy do I feel stupid.  Of COURSE!!  The L.E.R.A. is a wonderful and entirely appropriate mod to pursue.  Thanks for catching that Andreé 

[petemoore]

  Who was posting a mod for it which reversed the PS on the LFO, which reversed the sweep?
  At the bottom of the schematic, the LED's were lifted from the bottom rail and moved to the top...something like that, other details too, reversing the up/down ramp curves to get closer to a 'Uni' ramping?

[swt]

andrew has some useful mods at the tone god. check them...

[oldrocker]

The statement below is from the John Hollis FAQ.  Has anyone tried this yet?  Or has anyone changed caps and added a feedback for just a phaser effect? (No vibe.)  I might try this as I've been curious to see how good an Easyvibe can be just a straight phase shifter.

Add a four pole two way rotary switch that substitutes 0.01uF capacitors in the phase shift network to make a normal phaser.
Add some feedback, a 1nF in series with 470K from the last stage to the input should do the trick.
If you do both the above mods you should get a passable substitute for the EH Small Stone.

[analog kid]

interesting , I have not seen that one in the Hollis Easyvibe FAQ's  though it was likely there then. 
also I recently brought a Rotovibe back to life , which I had always wanted from the time i heard a guy using it w/ good technique and looked at the pcb inside ( before i realized most of that real estate was prob for switching, buffering etc..)
anyway I like it but I really think the Easyvibe I built does the vibing much nicer , which prob stands to reason since the ROTO is designed for a more linear sweep i think,    However the thing that I found it beats my Easy on is the clarity and fidelity of the signal.  now i understand this is going to be the case in most instances due to the buffering, 1k source output impedance .   also the easy seems alot more bassy/muddy in comparison though may be due to the afformentioned.
SO , the mention of someone "improving the fidelity" of an easyvibe makes me curious.  What would we be talking about here?   and the way I love feedback I may even try implementing that path to input in my easyvibe for gilggles. I  am sure I good idea when converting to normal phase stage values but I wonder what feedback would sound like with Vibing?

[petemoore]

  Use a 3pdt to add caps in series and or parallel, leaving the .01uf cap in it's stage alone, bringing the other 3 cap values to .01uf, making it a four stage phaser/uni-vibe thing.
  Then use like a 1 meg pot for the feedback resistor...see what that gets, trim or add stop resistors as necessary, you might want to put the feedback cap somewhere it's value can be easily changed.

[oldrocker]

Well I tried the .01 caps and I love the phasing.  I'm still working on the feadback but as of now this is a nice strong phase shifter.  It's vibrato mode still works great too.  I'll keep plugging away at the feedback since it's not doing much at this point.  I had to turn down the intensity trim pot to half way to tone it down some.  I had the trim pot all the way up when I had the univibe setup.  I will get much more use out of this effect more as a phase shifter than a univibe so I'm really happy about that.  I still have my Phase 45 w\Univibe mods if I feel I need it.

[Joe Kramer]

Hey Mark,

I haven't built the EV, but here's a mod I like on my own homebrew vibe.  See those pairs of 1N914s in the EV LFO just before the DEPTH control?  If you lift one pair--the ones connecting cathode to Vb I believe--this should give something approaching a "hypertriangular" waveshape.  This makes the sweep move more slowly through the negative half of the cycle and tames some of the pitchbend wobble.  This is especially useful in the vibrato setting.   Ironically, the ear hears this asymmetrical sweep as more even than a symmetrical sweep.  This mod also works with phasers and flangers--you can see the same trick used by Hollis in his Ultra Flanger.  Hope this helps.

Regards,
Joe

[Jim Jones]

Well I tried the .01 caps and I love the phasing.  I'm still working on the feadback but as of now this is a nice strong phase shifter.  It's vibrato mode still works great too.  I'll keep plugging away at the feedback since it's not doing much at this point.  I had to turn down the intensity trim pot to half way to tone it down some.  I had the trim pot all the way up when I had the univibe setup.  I will get much more use out of this effect more as a phase shifter than a univibe so I'm really happy about that.  I still have my Phase 45 w\Univibe mods if I feel I need it.

I like the .01 caps in there, too!  To me it sounds very Vibe-ish still but it's a more pleasing phase sound than the staggered cap values for some reason.  I think the lack of feedback is what makes it sound lush and a little sloppy - perfect for my tastes!

Jim 

[Ripdivot]

Here is a schematic of some of the easyvibe mods.

http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/9670/easyvibemoduj0.gif

[Ripdivot]

Sorry, here is a larger image...

[free electron]

Well, it would nice to mention where did you get most of those mods from...
Here's my original LFO mod schem:

And here's how does it sound:
Sound Sample

I really doubt, that the PreBass mod will give you much, especially with 10M input impedance.

[Ripdivot]

Sorry about that free electron. I wasn't trying to take any credit but just to show a bunch of mods on to one schematic. They are scattered all over the place. I should have added the cap mods in the phase shift section as well.