Looking for advice on levels within a Dwarf to PC/Ableton setup

Thanks Jon! That’s a super piece of advice. Hearing that you yourself use a bluetooth 4.0 dongle gives me some extra incentive to replicate that piece in my setup as well. I’m gonna give that a try! Cheers!

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The MOD Dwarf is a way more complex device than most of the “multi-effects boxes”, exactly because the MOD Dwarf is not “just a multi-effects box”. It’s way more than that. It can be a synthesizer. It can be a MIDI “mastermind”. It can be a sequencer…it can really be a lot of things and it can be all simultaneously. This has obviously its great sides and its downsides. A great side is that a MOD Dwarf can be used in many places and “hats” of your musicianship. In other words, it can feed a lot of different needs and serve a lot of different musicians and music styles/needs. Looking at this same thing from a different and more “dark” perspective, you need to adjust it for your needs and your setup.
You don’t really need to learn all these setup things. But by learning it you will be able to take way more from your device.

There are no “dumb questions” :wink:
Yes. You can use the “User Profiles” for that. Check it out here.

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Hey Frank,

I’m definitely curious to give it a listen once you’re good to go!

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Jon, this is a terrric response ansd certainly clears up some things - thank you! Btw, I hope none of this discussion does anything to erode the perception that underscores everything for me, which is that the MOD system is absolutely killer and I’m loving it!

If I might make a wee suggestion, given the foregoing: Though there’s the possibility that it might be there already and I simply may have missed it in my eager rush to get my hands on my new unit and start working with it right away (my wife would no doubt say that’s a “typical guy thing” LOL), I think it might be helpful for future newbies if the user documentation were expanded to address issues of setup in more descriptive detail. Like, for example, “If you’re using an electric guitar instrument through: a) an audio interface, here are the unit’s input and output settings you will need to adjust to get optimal sound quality…” My honest feedback on the existing WIKI is that it is good but somewhat minimal. I think it could be expanded in some areas. And in doing so, the MOD team could hep itself co-opt some of the calls for tech support, whether on the forum or elsewhere, that might ensue from future newbies encountering some of the same issues. Just some food for thought.

Keep up the great work, and thank you for everything.

Loving the mighty Dwarf!

Cheers
Frank

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Thank you @jon !

Hell yes @Frank_Paul !

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Thank you :slight_smile:

No worries with that :slight_smile: we are having a healthy discussion here and, again, there are no wrong questions. @SillySovietNYC question was totally pertinent and understandable.

This is a super valid request and something that we have been talking about internally. We really want to work on more and better documentation regarding everything on the platform. Especially documentation that helps new users onboard on it.

I totally agree with you on this. The wiki is something that I’m “mastering” and it’s something that I’ve been feeling is missing a bit of my attention. I want to change that soon enough.

Absolutely true! The biggest problem with that is that when users ask “the house is already on fire” and we need to answer as fast as we can. This steals the time to go over the documentation structure. Hopefully, we are getting closer to solve it :wink:

Thank you for your honest feedback @Frank_Paul :slight_smile:

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@jon If that post I made regarding midi mapping (Blackstar midi pedal control - #3 by Elk_wrath) is useful for a beginner, please feel free to include it.

I personally felt right at home with the dwarf and it’s layout, but anything I can do to ease a burden is something worthy of the time spent.

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Thanks Jon. One thing that has impressed me immediately in interacting with you and the MOD team generally, plus reading some of the other Forum threads, is that you are all totally supportive of and engaged with your user community and have an open-mind, open-ears approach to hearing feedback, which just speaks total credibility. Thanks for everything! Cheers.

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The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask! :wink: You can ask your boss a pay raise. The answer will probably be “NO!!!”, but --hey! – asking doesn’t hurt. And it might be the case that your boss will feel like you’re off to something better, so in the end you may get a raise!

We’re all on the same boat here, so when you ask a question everybody else learns from it.

Your comment is much appreciated. Thanks!

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Thank you so much for your nice words :slight_smile: We all do our best, I can assure you about that :slight_smile:

@Elk_wrath thank you. I’m honestly lacking some time right now for that, but when I get it any information will be useful (including me keeping on top of the discussions here in the forum)

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One thing that really helped me finally get my head around the MOD pedal set up is like seeing it as a real world bunch of VSTs, and right at the end of my Ableton signal chain I have a limiter - adding this to my all my boards in the Duo (soon to be Dwarf) really was a game changer - that and assigning separate volume controls for each signal change - and even some gain staging within the chains - as well as using a compressor as my signal enters from my physical pedal board really smooths out all those volume spikes - it does take a lot of fine tuning and experimenting but it’s what the MOD Devices are all about - total control and customisation!

I agree a really well made film or series of films and downloadable instructions on setting up things like gain staging, side chaining, parallel signal paths and recording into a DAW or using direct into a live desk on a gig would be massively helpful :blush::+1:t2:

Have fun

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Mike - this is awesomely helpful - thanks so much!

Your post was especially interesting because I have only just recently realized that it was not just the audio input and output levels on the Dwarf that were potentially having an effect on my signal clarity, but also - probably even moreso - the number and types of effects I have running simultaneously in Ableton. Before getting the Dwarf, I had created a couple of slightly extended effects rigs for my bass within Ableton, including compressor, limiter, reverb, delay, amp/cab sim, utility gain, etc. Now, one might quibble with the idea of having that many - or even any - effects on within Ableton when there are so many to work with via the pedal. This was not by design; I initially simply forgot I had all those going in Ableton when starting to work with the Dwarf. It was only when I got the idea to try turning each of the Ableton effects off, first one by one and then all of them, that suddenly, the remaining noise in my signal path was almost eliminated! I’m sure that to an experienced user this is all obvious and yet I don’t know that you can come to these realizations until you’ve encountered the problem and then figured out how to resolve it.

So I’m getting there, but I have not yet found my holy grail setup that encompasses both my Dwarf pedalboards and how I’m processing them within Ableton (via Focusrite). However, it’s a complex system and one’s personal tastes are not necessarily easy to program without a lot of trial and error experimentation; all of that is to be expected. I’m confident that I will get there, though, eventually.

One thing that remains a struggle for me on the Ableton side, is getting a real pleasing stereo image in the mix, with as much headroom as I would like. I’ve been playing with toys like auto pan and also trying the technique of track duplication with manual panning, but I still don’t know what I’m missing, as my signal always sounds narrower and more monaural than I would prefer. Do you have techniques for achieving that?

Since I’m not sure that I have my compressor, limiter, and gain staging deployed optimally yet, would I be able to pick your brain in a little more detail as to which of those you have placed exactly where in your signal chain, both in the Dwarf and in Ableton? If you prefer to message privately, I would love the chance to learn more from you about that (either way).

Cheers
Frank

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It’s happens exactly to me , totally
when im monitoring Dwarf directly from headphone sounds great but, when i use its output to insert it to the audio interface averything sounds odd, it´s like if i never fixed or prepared the sound when monitoring with headphones while creating the pedalboards. So, i tried to create pedalboards “live monitoring” thru Focal Monitors — note to mention my headphones are Focal too, i mean with this great headphones—
and the difference is black and white—not a good one— between the headphone output and the jack output . I did connected the headphone output with a cable etc etc etc ( of course i checked the output gain up ) to notice if the problem was in the headphones—of course not— … i connected Dwarf in between UAD Pedals —note to mention the set up that i have of this pedals is noiseless and beautiful sounding without the Dwarf— sadly when i connect Dwarf and trying to hard a nice gain staging everything is so despair and noisy and very subtle distortion where shouldn’t exist

So if somebody could help with this tell us

this is not a complain, we know MOD is a startup, this is to get better about it

That is interesting. I have a similar setup going from the dwarf outputs into an evo8 into ableton. I have noticed that the headphone output had a lot more „highend“ than my monitors but noise wasn‘t an issue. Do you mind sharing the pedalboard?

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Hi ! glad to read you :slight_smile:

the pedalboard is not too complex
it’s a chain testing the new AIDA neural training.
The training was done perfect by Google Colab,

it’s just The AIDA’s followed by a couple of IRs cabinets ,EQ to filter unnecessary freqs,followed by a gain to compensate when necessary.
i wouldn’t wanted to color the chain with compressors inside the pedalboard—to control spikes— because i love the sound of an external , but maybe that will do the trick

best !!

ADRIAN

did you test the Dwarf without any plugins? Meaning just connect input and output on the pedalboard. Do you notice a difference in quality there?

I always bring everything down to zero when I’m in a new environment. Then I bring in the level of the input and output.

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Yeah , but it’s not a bad idea to start over again :slightly_smiling_face:

@ADK I haven’t used the headphone out of the dwarf in a little while but as you said the difference to the outputs is noticable. what I found recently is to turn down the output to -12db and raise the input of my interface. This helps a little and might be worth a shot.

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thanks for your input :raised_hands:t2:

Indeed , that was the first thing that i modified , but , i complemented with compression and the preamps —taking care of noise ratio signals—

Until now is doing the trick; now i’m struggling with Dwarf CPU :man_shrugging:t2::sweat_smile: issues , because i made an AIDA’s preamp modeling a little heavy i suppose, but it’s the quality that sound needs to be worthable for me