Using Dystorpia with your Eurorack system
We recently released our first guitar pedal, Dystorpia! If you’re not a guitarist but are interested in integrating distortion pedals with your Eurorack system, this post is for you. We’ve made a couple of modules already that can help with this sort of thing, but many of the concepts we’ll share here can be replicated with modules you may already have in your system.
Levels and adapters
Pedals generally use ¼” TS jacks for their inputs and outputs, and generally have a lower level than Eurorack does. ⅛” to ¼” adapters (or adapter cables) are plentiful, and do a great job of taking care of the mechanical side of the connection.
Levels aren’t too difficult to deal with either. Some pedals – including our Dystorpia – can be used with higher-level signals like desktop synthesizers just fine. Depending on the patch, you may find that going directly into a pedal sounds okay without any level shifting at all.
If you hear clipping, though, something that can shift your levels down going into the pedal (and then back up coming out) will be very helpful. Nive Grad was designed for exactly this, but any attenuator and preamp will do the trick.
Parallel processing
When we originally designed Nive Grad, we envisioned it as the perfect pairing for Xer Mixa, our system mixer. While traditionally you might see reverb or delay units used as send effects, parallel processing with distortion is an awesome way to add a bunch of grit to a whole mix. Perfect for more industrial or noise-filled patches!
This one’s simple: patch the in and out of Dystorpia through a level shifter as necessary, then patch Out A to the level shifter’s input and In A to the level shifter’s input. Then, use the channel send controls to route the desired channels through some distortion.
If you’re using Xer Mixa, there are a couple of extra useful techniques you can apply.
Dystorpia, along with many other distortion units, is mono. In the Bus A configuration menu, you can use the “Force Pan” setting to make Out A ignore any pan changes on the channels that are sent out of the bus. This will ensure that adjustments to channel pan don’t change the amount that a mixer channel is sent to the bus.
By default, this configuration will provide parallel processing, meaning that some of the dry, undistorted signal will always be present in the mix. If you’d like to instead do bus processing where some channels exclusively go through the distortion pedal, you can change the configuration so that Send M is off. By turning the Send A amount to maximum, the channel fader will behave as usual, but will be routed exclusively through our distortion bus.
Modular modulators
Dystorpia features an expression pedal input with a twist: it can also be used with CV signals! It has a 0V to +5V range, and can be patched to any modulator in your Eurorack system with a ¼” to ⅛” TS cable. If your modulators are outside of this range, an attenuator can be used to constrain them to sound their best.
The CV input affects the Tone control, which emphasizes different parts of the frequency spectrum. Patch in an LFO for subtle timbral modulation, or use an envelope as part of a subtractive voice and use Dystorpia in place of a filter.
Explore even more
If you haven’t already checked it out, Dystopia’s user manual has an illustrated examples section with some of our favorite patch examples. You can take a listen and try them out for yourself here.
