I’m trying to diagnose this loud whine problem from my Boss DS1 distortion pedal.
Would anyone who is familiar with the workings of these pedals care to take a listen to the file below to hear the destructive whine noise in between the distorted xox notes.
I left ‘tone’ and ‘level’ pots midway and ‘dist’ is at midway at the beginning.
The only thing I boost in the example is ‘dist’ up to 100% and by then you can hear how loud that whine is compared to the xox notes. By the end of the clip I decrease ‘list’ to 0 but it’s still very noticeable.
It’s far too prominent to be normal noise. What do you reckon?
It’s the same regardless of use with batteries or adapter.
Points to note:
Whine only evident when pedal depressed to ‘on’.
Adapter is an ungrounded (I’m not even sure if you’re able to ground these pedals at the mains) cheap knockoff. Anyways it also happens with batteries so I’m stumped.
Same whine heard when connected to minibrute.
Tried Hi-Z, low-Z setting on interface. No change.
as guitar player i consider noise with distortion pedals as normal.
i think the pedal is OK.
it attenuates the basic operating noise your machines always produce.
there are many different ways to minimize that.
i´d start with good quality cables, good power supplies, maybe di boxes
when necessary. but you´ll never get 100% rid of it.
for the pedal itself running it on batteries is the best solution already.
using a good adapter (the original boss for example) is ok too.
just turn the pedal off when not used or use a noise gate.
also experiment with the levels you send into and out of the pedal.
i overlooked the word “interface” in your post.
using all kinds of cables, usb, computer etc. can be a noise source too.
try to keep current cables and audio cables seperate.
So you reckon that horrible whine sound in between the notes is normal?
I’ve listened to same DS1 pedals working with xox/tt303/tb303 on youtube and they did not have that whine. Hmmm.
Thanks for your input though hereiamhere75:) Appreciate it.
So you reckon that horrible whine sound in between the notes is normal?
I’ve listened to same DS1 pedals working with xox/tt303/tb303 on youtube and they did not have that whine. Hmmm.
Thanks for your input though hereiamhere75:) Appreciate it.[/quote]
just plug in a (short) cable into the DS1 with nothing connected to it. when there is still that
whine sound you know the pedal produces it.
That kind of sounds like digital noise floor garbage. Is your signal really low or something?
Workarounds: set a deep narrow notch EQ in your DAW to take out the tone, or use a noise gate. Maybe pre-amp the signal before hitting the pedal. Or just tell everyone, hey it’s hardware man.
That really sounds like a ground loop - aka your audio interface.
Two things to test:
Try running into it without the pedal - if you can still hear the noise it’s not the pedal (though keep in mind the pedal might be amplifying it).
To test it out, try using a ‘cheater plug’ to un-ground the computer…if that works, it is for sure a ground loop.
You could try ground loop isolators - they apparently work very well.