My new Nautilus is pretty fantastic, but I’ve hit one issue that bugs me.
After playing with the wacky and wonderful stuff, I’ve just been trying to use Nautilus as a standard ping-pong delay with a mono input signal. The manual describes how to get this to work using either (a) the right input, or (b) the left input, but with a dummy cable plugged into the right input to prevent normalisation. They do the same thing, only differing in whether the dry signal is panned hard left or hard right.
And this works - well sort of! The problem is the panning of the dry signal and/or the first repeat.
To explain what I mean, I’ll use the following notation:
A capital letter for L, R, C means the position of the dry signal (left, right or centre).
A lower case letter l, r means the position of the wet signal.
So, if I use the right input, I get this: R r l r l r…
So yes, this is a ping-pong, but the first repeat is on the same side as the input signal. That’s never what I want from a ping-pong delay!
Better would be: R l r l r… The dry signal is still hard-panned, but at least the first repeat is on the other side from the dry signal.
Better still would be: C l r l r l r… That’s what pretty much any standard effects unit will do with a mono input. (Admittedly a lot of ‘standard’ effects units sum their inputs to mono for processing anyway, so they have no choice but to work like this).
Now obviously I can work around this: set the mix on the Nautilus to be completely wet, and then use a mixer to handle adding in the dry signal outside of the Nautilus. But that ties up a mixer, and it removes the point of having a CV control of the mix.
So: could we please have a ‘mono mode’ that sums the inputs and feeds them ONLY into the left (or right) channel of the FX processing? That seems like it covers every scenario I could want:
Ping pong from a mono signal: plugging into the left input (normalised to the right) would give us a centred dry signal, but the repeats would be either hard left or right, and the mix control is useful again.
Ping pong from a stereo signal with very similar audio on both the left and right: currently the ping pong is not a strong effect if presented with this type of source material, since both the left and right echoes sound at the same time, before swapping over for the next repeat. If the input channels don’t differ much, then the ping pongs don’t differ much either. Putting the Nautilus into mono-mode would keep the strong stereo behaviour of the delays.
Ping ping from a stereo signal with very different audio on left and right: stick to stereo mode and let the Nautilus do what it currently does!
I hope that make sense!
Thanks