To get familiar with the Pepper, it's good to hook up the basic whole
chain. Instrument, pedals, pro gear, and your amp.
But first of all before plugging the IEC AC cord check the voltage is
set to the voltage of your country, 110v covers 100 to 120 volts 220v
covers 220v to 240 volts.
The DC power plug is keyed, pin 1 is ground, pin 2 is -16 volts pin 3
is +16 volts. Don't force it, it should slide right in.
We will get into the ins and outs in more detail in this manual but
one thing to keep in mind to keep everything happy is use the proper
cables. That is easy though, all cables can be regular guitar tip sleeve
except for the pro trs out, the pro trs in, and expansion trs out. These
need to be tip ring sleeve balanced connections. If you use a tip sleeve
you will be driving signal into the ground, your gain structure will be
compromised and distortion will result. The only other cable is for the
mic level out which obviously has to be a balanced XLR mic cable.
So read on, the Pepper is pretty simple and once you've hooked it up
with assistance of this manual hopefully you'll never have to use the
manual again.
getting started
Instrument input
and the load off button
The instrument in is where you plug your instrument in.
The maximum level that you can feed into this input is approximately
+13dB before clipping distortion (that's a lot for an instrument in).
A typical passive pickup puts out about -14dB. You have plenty of
headroom.
Depending on what type of pick up or if your instrument has a pre-
amp, the load impedance of this instrument input will effect the tone
of your signal. It's subtle, but if you send a lot of time with an instru-
ment and an amp, you'll hear it.
Most vintage passive guitar pick ups like a 1 meg ohm to 500 k ohm
load, too low a load it will sound dull and compressed. Too high a
load will sound clangy and bright.
Piezo pick ups want to see a very high or no load.
I find with bass typically no load brings out the woody character of
the instrument, suitable for a more lead sound, with a higher load
more round back up sound.
If your instrument has a preamp, the load will have no effect on your
tone. The difference between load on and load off won't be noticeable.
The load off button on the front of the Pepper makes the instrument
input impedance 10 meg ohms, effectively no load.
With the button out, load on, you can adjust the load from 100k ohms
to 2.3 meg ohms via the rear trim pot.
The Pepper is shipped with this trim pot adjusted for a 1 meg ohm
load, typical of most guitar amplifiers. So you might find you never
need to touch this. My suggestion is only on a day where you have
the time to have a good listen, carefully adjust and see what you find
works best for your instruments. Compare the sound of plugging
directly into your amp with the sound through the Pepper, adjust ac-
cordingly. After that, load on and load off is more than likely, all you
will ever need for the right sound for you, with your instruments.
