and other lies I tell myself…
In the process of prepping for an audition this week, my board went through its fourth evolution in three months.
There was a time when I really wasn’t big on using pedals. The sound of the guitar hitting the amp, regardless of gain level, sounded better to me.
My first distortion was a BOSS DS1, because I couldn’t afford an MXR Distortion+ and hey, Prince used a DS1 (at least I thought he did at the time). It was horrible. I still don’t like them. It was a “compromise to compensate” (in this case for not owning a Marshall plexi). Around the time tone became “paramount” (1987), someone who contributed a lot to my guitar development got me into the ProCo RAT.
Despite what I thought were shortcomings, I acquired a taste for the way the RAT sounded, adapted my playing and it was part of my rig until it was stolen almost 10 years later (1996 – took the gig bag, left the Twin. HA! weak ass thief).
Until that point, I literally had one pedal between the guitar and the amp. After the robbery, the “one pedal” spot was filled by a TS9 until I started rolling with pedalboard setups a couple years later.
After 2000 I experimented with A LOT of different drives (including modelers). The super linear output section on a Fender Twin leaves a lot of room for preamp slamming experiments.
EVOL 1 began last summer. Determined to become less dependent on gear for tone, I stripped down to a Temple Audio SOLO 18. Even the home brewed joints remained on the bigger board in favor of “stock stuff” from the “tool box”.
Before:
After:
Somewhere in the process, a decision was made to keep bigger/original board intact and config the new one to a genre that didn’t need a lot of stuff (I was working on country chops at the time)
EVOL 2
Stayed minimal but wanted a bit more “crossover”. I didn’t need the compressor as much for chicken pickin and decided that Tremolo is less cooler than Univibe. There wasn’t enough room for the Rocktron Vertigo (from the bigger board), but plenty for the Moen Jimi Nova (also sounds better than just “decent for the price” +1).
(Note the difference between the Drive settings on the TS9)
EVOL 3
After a month or so, the wild hairs started growing in. I A/B’d the modded TS9 against my homebrewed version and remembered the hours spent going through the range of cap values to dial in the bottom (sounds less middy while keeping the bottom tight).
The modded RAT (see EVOL 2 pic) brought a “familiar/safe” lead tone. The wild hairs required something more “outside” for this swap. Rather than pull the Malekko Helium (Fuzz/Octave Fuzz) from the other board, I went through everything I had in the toolbox (including a DS1, modded, still no go).
3 Fuzzes and 1 shitty Distortion led to the most “outside” pedal I owned.
I’ve had the Malekko Chaos just as long as the Helium (7 yrs), was never imaginative enough to make it more useful than “fucked up in a good way” tones. All of sudden I’m hearing the voice of Eric Barbour talking about how “conservative” guitar players are regarding gear * After a productive hour or two** of range testing, the Chaos became the preferred fuzz/trash/lead tone pedal of all time! (for now).
This config was functional until working on material for the audition required a delay with tap tempo AND feedback control (ie. go from 30% to 100%)
EVOL 4a and 4b
Determined to keep the EVOL 3 config intact I added the H9 via the EB Volume pedal doing a split from the boards main out. Dry signal from the board goes through the tuner jack, volume pedal jack goes to H9. I use the volume pedal as an FX send. The expression pedal is mapped to the delay patch’s feedback (can you say a whole day of making infinite ambient pads?).
This worked until I started imagining nightmare scenarios at gigs. I didn’t want to dump the Ekko 616 (analog), but after a week of running the audition set, I was using a single H9 patch for anything needing delay anyway. With the H9 in that spot, this config runs with a single power cord (pedal power has a jack to run the H9), a short patch and two extra cables. The H9 out goes to a separate channel or the other Twin depending on how much room there is.
This is what I’m rolling with (stay tuned)
*all the voices in my head are people I actually know
**maybe longer, time is a construct anyway…