HiFi Subjectivist ¦ Audio Forum ¦ NVA User Group

Do you need telling?
No, I didn't think so.

slinger wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 8:42 pm Do you need telling?
No, I didn't think so.

What ever my wife tells me must be correct!

There has been insanity... err... I mean movement on the pedalboard front, and I've finally finished building, although I may, at some time in the future, get the full-blown version of the TC Electronic Sub 'n' Up if I spot one going for peanuts, and the same for the Harmonic energiser pedal, I could be tempted to swap that for a proper Electro Harmonix Cock Fight pedal.

I've bought a new amp too. I've finally got a Marshall. All 5W-worth of Marshall, with a switch that puts it over to 0.5W. Great for indoors though. It's got a single 8" Celestion speaker and has 2x ECC83 preamp valves and 1x EL34 power valve. It also has a gain boost.

Anyway, here's the result of both my pedalboard madness and my love of Photoshop.



The separate board, which goes straight into the amp, is mostly for "lead" sounds, while the effects loop is more geared towards textures. The other reason for splitting the effects was that effects loops bypass the preamp section, and amps aren't too partial to getting blown up by stuff poking loads of pedal-powered gain straight into the amp, with no "buffer" to soften the blow.

A couple of pedals are "doubled up" because with the amp's footswitch I can switch the effects loop in and out, and I wanted compression and reverb on both boards.

Hmm, the mystery of random electrical brownouts has been solved

If you turned that lot off, maybe Germany will have enough gas to get through the winter

With all those pedals - who needs a guitar??

slinger wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 3:24 pm There has been insanity... err... I mean movement on the pedalboard front, and I've finally finished building, although I may, at some time in the future, get the full-blown version of the TC Electronic Sub 'n' Up if I spot one going for peanuts, and the same for the Harmonic energiser pedal, I could be tempted to swap that for a proper Electro Harmonix Cock Fight pedal.

I've bought a new amp too. I've finally got a Marshall. All 5W-worth of Marshall, with a switch that puts it over to 0.5W. Great for indoors though. It's got a single 8" Celestion speaker and has 2x ECC83 preamp valves and 1x EL34 power valve. It also has a gain boost.

Anyway, here's the result of both my pedalboard madness and my love of Photoshop.



The separate board, which goes straight into the amp, is mostly for "lead" sounds, while the effects loop is more geared towards textures. The other reason for splitting the effects was that effects loops bypass the preamp section, and amps aren't too partial to getting blown up by stuff poking loads of pedal-powered gain straight into the amp, with no "buffer" to soften the blow.

A couple of pedals are "doubled up" because with the amp's footswitch I can switch the effects loop in and out, and I wanted compression and reverb on both boards.

I hate to ask but, what does it sound like?

I’m a pedal guy. I’m pretty straight ahead, my pedal board is usually:
Mad fuzz pedal - Kyll-drive
Pre amp (Nocturne Atomic Brain)
Pre amp Mad Professor Simble.
Clean boost - Nashpedal - Beardy boost
Treble boost - Beano
Delay - Strymon El Capistrano
Reverb - valve Reverb tank

The fuzz pedal - I rarely use this cranky old fuzz pedal as a fuzz, it’s recalcitrant, demands to be first in the chain otherwise it doesn’t play well with other.
I mostly use this in one of two modes. Crazy 60’e Garage band fuzz - or fuzz free clean boost. The clean boost isn’t that clean, it puts a bump in the mids, and adds just a touch of hair. Makes that ‘edge of breakup’ tone even better. It reminds me of a Klon, in the magic it adds to your tone. It’s not about that gain, just that special something it adds to clean tone.
The next two Pre-amp pedals are not about gain boosting so much, more about changing pick dynamics. The Atomic Brain in particular makes your valve amp sound more lively, dynamic, and more present. More three dimensional.
Imagine you’ve had a duvet on top of your valve amp, muffling the sound a bit, and taking the duvet off makes it sound more articulate and clearer….that’s what am Atomic Brain does. I play on edge of breakup, mostly clean, but dig in for dirt. Pick light it’s clean, hit the strings hard, it overdrives.
The Atomic Brain is excellent for achieving that.

If you play with gain on full all the time, doing your best Steve Vai impersonations, then the pedal is less valuable.

The Simble does a similar job to the Nocturne. Stacking the two pre amps pushes my valve amps to achieve that edge of breakup tone at lower volumes.

Clean boost is again pushing the pre amp section of my valve amp(s) to break up at lower volumes. The treble boost really pushes the amp into gain territory, all those Brian May sounds come from a valve amp running flat out, being goosed to varying degrees by a good treble boost.

Strymon El Capistan is a fabulous vintage (multi head emulating) tape style delay pedal. My favourite of all time. I either use if for slap-back, mad run-away self oscillating night-time ambient delays, and anything in between. Superb pedal.

And I love a proper Fender 60’s valve reverb tank for proper drippy 60’s surf guitar sounds.

I occasionally tinker with a tremolo pedal, but more for subtle effect, (think Nancy Sinatra - Bang Bang).

This is a fab setup, but not very portable, lugging around a reverb tank everywhere. So recently I bought a Line6 HX Effects for my office. Still Pre goosed by two Pre amp pedals.

The HX Effects is extremely capable, however I’m too old and too much of a Luddite. I like simple
Pedals I can stomp on. I’ve managed to get some great sounds out of the HXEfffects, but I just prefer pedals. I find this multi effect thing a bit joyless.

Friends disagree, they’ve spend months learning all the tweaks, setting snapshots, tweaking, they’ve made theirs sound astonishing. I just don’t have months free to do that, or the will, or the inclination. So, I may sell it and buy more pedals. Yay!

Thankfully, it all sounds just like it should, Geoff. All of the pedals have been tested individually, and when I'm feeling a bit better I can start working out things like multi-pedal combinations - seeing what works best with what - and setting up the compressors on each board. I've been a bit under the weather lately.

Several of the TC Electronic pedals have their "Tone Print" system built in, which enables the saving of one's own presets, or downloading presets developed both by the company and by artists as varied as Dream Theatre's John Petrucci, and Albert Lee, so I'll be "auditioning" some of those too.

TheMarlin wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 11:21 pm ...

The HX Effects is extremely capable, however I’m too old and too much of a Luddite. I like simple
Pedals I can stomp on. I’ve managed to get some great sounds out of the HXEfffects, but I just prefer pedals. I find this multi effect thing a bit joyless.

Friends disagree, they’ve spend months learning all the tweaks, setting snapshots, tweaking, they’ve made theirs sound astonishing. I just don’t have months free to do that, or the will, or the inclination. So, I may sell it and buy more pedals. Yay!

+1
I got that on Facebook. "Oh, why didn't you just buy a FILL IN MULTI-FX UNIT OF CHOICE HERE?
My answer was along the lines of I know how pedals work and I can't be arsed trying to learn what is the equivalent of a brand new instrument with a 500-page instruction manual.

There are some pedals, like the compressor(s) I mentioned in my reply to Geoff, that are a bit different than bog-standard compressor pedals, and that'll take some getting to grips with, but other than that it's twist a knob then kick-it-and-see. My ancient brain can just about cope with that.