Hey there,
Like many others, I have been locked into a battle with the dwarf over noise.
Generally I don’t bother with trying to squash it because I am not a music professional by any stretch of the word, so the noise issue I just learned to live with by making all my tracks sound like they’re underwater.
However, I was super interested in the troubleshooting aspect of the issue, and saw some really awesome tips and tricks being shared.
I had some cash set aside from a birthday and all that, and just decided to buy a couple of devices from radial.
What you see there are 2 devices from radial.
The green on is a passive stereo DI box with pad/lift options
The grey is a passive stereo isolator with pad/lift.
Now I don’t recommend throwing money at the problem if you have the know how to fix it on your own.
My particular situation seemed to need it.
My bluebox is not a balanced mixer, and I send tracks direct from the mixer into the dwarf.
This has been causing significant noise, at least my fix has solved the issue so I am making a rather large assumption on the root of the issue.
I have also been struggling with getting enough signal out of my dwarf, and it did not matter much on what sort of internal gain settings I messed with. I love the sound of the pedal, but had been getting frustrated with trying to get the volume I needed from it.
I am running a stereo breakout from the Cue out on my bluebox, and into the passive DI box to convert the signal from unbalanced to balanced for the dwarf input. I applied gain lift to the signal, and used XLR to TRS adaptors to the inputs of the dwarf.
From the dwarf, I used short TRS cables to connect to the isolator, applied ground lift, and then plugged in 6.3mm to 3.5mm trs cables from the output of the isolator back into the mixer on channels 5 and 6.
For the first time, my “Main” track on my mixer is silent. No ghost noise, no whine, no gain issue. Just pure, clean audio.
I ended up being able to essentially do a BOGO on those items because I had gift money, and I really hope that others won’t need to spend more cash to fix this.
I think a big culprit is my mixer, and having unbalanced to balanced connections. Dunno though, I’m still a big noob lol
Either way, the dwarf is no longer producing noise other than the ones I want it to, and most importantly, the boxes gave me significant volume increase from the dwarf outputs without adding noise, sucking tone, or peaking.
I do use the pad function on my audio interface, mostly because it’s a cheap one and the preamps actually are noisy if gain is turned up, so I have to fight that noise as I record through the USB out into my iPad.
Now I just need to deal with my noisy right channel output on my deepmind 12, and that should finally make things silent.
Idk of any of this is useful to anyone, but I figured I’d share what I ended up doing to resolve my issue.
I’m back to jamming, and next week I have a behringer arp 2600 grey meanie edition getting delivered. I will be spending quite some time working with that and the dwarf. Hopefully I’ll make some cool vibes to share.
Hope all is well!