And back to the topic of tubes....

[Debby and Gene Stopp]

Got a Metasonix Hellfire Modulator recently - here's my impressions for
those who are curious
about this box....

This device utilizes vacuum tubes to get some pretty drastic warping of an
audio input signal. It's definitely not your ordinary tube distortion box -
for one thing, there's no way to know what you're doing when you first start
to play with it. You can't walk up to it, and say "oh yeah, I've messed with
these before". This kind of box has not yet existed. This is a good thing,
in my opinion - no preconceived ideas, no barriers to exploration, and a lot
of surprises.

By now it's probably fairly well-known that vacuum tubes are just plain
different than solid-state electronics. I know there's some controversy out
there, so before I get in it too deep I should probably say that I'm one of
the tube fanatics. I like tubes. They sound different than solid-state. And
they do really behave differently - a couple weeks ago I was fixing a tube
amp and one of the power tubes was bad (screen grid shorted to something,
apparently). When I powered the amp up, it screamed and howled and moaned at
full blast - I turned it off pretty quick to save my ears (and those
expensive Dynaco transformers). The amp's all fixed up now, but my god what
great noises those were! There's no way I could synthesize those. That's
what the Hellfire's like sometimes.

It's a little bit out of control, and you'd better enjoy turning knobs all
the time (I know I do!). The setup I used was a Moog 900-series modular,
with the Hellfire between a single VCO and the VCF in a traditional patch.
Sometimes I would set up the Hellfire knobs and then leave them, and play
the modular from the keyboard. Other times I would leave the modular in a
static state, and then play the knobs on the Hellfire. Either way the result
is not always musical, or not always drastically strange, so you need to
experiment a lot. But I think that what this means is that there's a lot of
unexplored territory in this box. It may not be for everybody - certainly if
you are the type who likes to call up presets that have an immediate and
distinct effect, you'll probably get impatient and wonder what the fuss is
all about. On the other hand, I managed to stumble across a setting that
reminded me of the good old Emerson trick of running a Hammond into a
fuzzface into a Marshall stack and turning off the tone generator motor. It
was so grungy that I cranked it way up and added some reverb till the
plaster cracked. Pissed off my wife real good, but I was liking it.

The behavior of the device seems to be somewhat chaotic - in other words,
what it does to the sound depends on what was doing just before, or what the
frequency of the input is, or even which direction a knob came from before
it came to it's current position. There's a couple of CV inputs (PWM and
Sweep) plus an internal LFO, and these can be used in various ways to affect
the waveform shaping. It's difficult to explain exactly what they do - like
I said before, normal synthesizer terminology doesn't apply here. But they
let you get even more crazy when used in a modular system.

I'm sure there's a bunch of similarly cool applications that I haven't tried
yet (what does it do to a Mellotron input? Hammond Organ? Guitar? Bass?
Flute? Sampler?) so there's a lot of experimentation down the road.

- Gene