From gbhalliday@hotmail.com Fri Feb 22 14:02:48 2002
Subject:Re: Motion sound Gas Pedal

I LOVE my Gas Pedal! I coveted this thing for a long time 'til I
finally found one second-hand. Yea, e'en though thou shalt not covet
thy neighbor's gear.

I play in a 9-piece band (4 horns) and find that I can nudge just
enough "goo" into my sound to get it to sit at just the right place
in the mix. Let me try to say that again :o) Sloow Chorale gets
buried by horns, Tremolo is too present (or just wrong), so the Gas
Pedal lets me get just the sound and presence I want without having
to click click click click click to keep the rotor at the speed I
want.

Another cool thing about it: It's EZ to check or set your speed by
the physical position of the foot pedal. You don't have to take your
eye off the chart!

It's interesting how the pedal works. It sends fast/slow/fast/slow
signals at varying intervals to the Pro3 to get the rotor to sit a a
certain speed. (It's kinda cool to watch the "fast" LED blink). A
brilliant idea since it doesn't require any mods on the Pro3, like a
rheostat on the motor or anything.

You have to set your internal accell/decell rate pots to the right
values to get a good response from the pedal. I've got mine tuned to
where it has a good spread of speed seettings, but also I can slam
the pedal to fast or slow position and still get a nice rate of ramp-
up or down. If I want an extra-slow ramp, it's very intuitive to use
the pedal to get it. It took some tinkering to get there. When out
of tune, you get either sluggish response or you end up full-blast
fast at a very short distance from the heel of the pedal.

The tech/legacy section of the Motion Sound website has the
schematic. It's a small circuit, so it seems like it could be kluged
into another 100kohm pedal, if you wanted to build one. Which is
what I'll be doing on the day mine is called home to heaven. Maybe
one could build an external box that would plug into any 100k pedal.
Hmmm.....

The pedal is BIG, HEAVY and has unrelated audio inputs and outputs to
route your audio signal to 2 different amps via a footswitch. Very
odd idea. It'd be better to use the switch for STOP, which, not
suprisingly, John Fisher had already thought of. There is a diagram
for doing the mod on the MS website.

Many thanks to John for the pedal, the schematic, and of course, the
Motion Sound itself. It's a beautiful thing.

Peace all,
Gary