Mix it up a bit.
Mixed salad.
Today, we’re going talk about the mix control on Aakii (ah-gee), and we’ll be having some friends join in on the action. In the demo, we’re pairing our Makoyii overdrive/distortion for a punchy sound, then we’ll add some movement with the Aakii chorus/vibrato to top off our tonal goodness. Together, these two pedals will demonstrate Aakii’s ability to texture your modulation using the mix control.
A quick sample of our bypass sound.
Let’s start off with our dry signal and for this demonstration, we’re going to keep it simple. We’re playing our trusty Fender Duo-Sonic into a Fender Deluxe where we keep the amp clean and let the pedals do the talking.
A short bit on Makoyii and Aakii.
First in the chain is Makoyii, an overdrive/distortion built for those who want a drive pedal that is sensitive to touch and has a bit of gain on tap. The Makoyii’s hardware has been structured in a way to listen to your playing dynamics and provide a full-course meal of dirt tone, ranging from subtle compression to edge-of-fuzz tones. Next in the chain is Aakii, a chorus/vibrato made for those who need a gig-friendly solution. Aakii goes against general chorus/vibrato standards by providing a warm modulated tone that smooths the highs and retains the lows, for an aquatic-like chorus to a syrupy vibrato.
The many textures of chorus and vibrato.
Now, let’s talk modulation for a second. Chorus and vibrato are two words that seem to get used interchangeably and we’ll take a moment to share our take on the two. Chorus at its heart is a time-based effect, where your signal experiences a constant shift in pitch. The pitch-shifted signal is then added to the dry signal, creating chorus. Chorus, because of the dry signal being present, sounds more fluid and is why people tend to label as a water-like effect.
Okay, but how do we get vibrato? It’s super easy. We remove the dry signal, leaving us with the pitch-shift signal aka vibrato. By removing the dry signal, this increases viscosity of the modulation, leaving us with a modulated tone that sounds thick and syrupy. We see that the formula to get chorus and vibrato is pretty simple, keep or remove the dry signal, then we’re left with either chorus or vibrato respectfully. However, things get interesting when we add a mix control to this formula.
Mix is the fix.
Generally, if a pedal has both chorus and vibrato, you’ll see either a switch or a mix control. The switch will toggle between full chorus and full vibrato, where the mix control will sweep from dry to chorus, then chorus to vibrato. When designing the Aakii’s mix control, we decided to skip the dry-to-chorus selection because we really didn’t find it that interesting. However, the true magic lies between why we came here in the first place (chorus and vibrato). Keeping the mix control within the chorus-to-vibrato range sets the user’s focus to truly explore the fun and exciting areas of modulation.
The mix control expands the modulation capabilities exponentially, making it a huge gamechanger. One thing that I noticed with the Chorus Ensemble from Boss was that there were certain tones you couldn’t get from the CE-2 that you could get from the CE-1. The sounds were mystical, almost bordering the lines of both chorus and vibrato. I tried and tried to get these tones with my previous chorus pedal adventures but with Aakii’s new mix control, my dreams have come a reality.
A short comment about the video.
We’re going to keep depth and rate static for the most part on this one, but the mix control is going to be tweaked to texturize our modulated tone using the simplicity of a single control. Be sure to keep an ear out for the difference between chorus and vibrato, and how the modulation is altered when we go from one extreme to the other. Personally, going from chorus to vibrato reminds me of adding flour to water, and the more we remove our dry signal, the more the sound begins to thicken. Either way, having the ability to add texture to the modulation opens so many doors and I hope this one brings a ton of inspiration to your creativity!
Let’s make some noise!
Now that we’ve explored the possible, let’s go and create the impossible. Visit here for Aakii and here for Makoyii.
