Hi Gearheads!

This year I made some major changes to my effect setup for the Stick. For anyone interested, I made a fotoset on flicker documenting the changes.

Evolution of a Pedalboard

Comments and questions welcome...

Best,
TheMM

Hey, great topic : I love seeing gear and pedals!
Great evolution too, a bit too huge to me (I don't like carrying too much)
I recognize most of your pedals, but can you describe them? (in particular the one near your StepABout on your latest PB version, I don't know it)
I'll hijack your thread later, I'll post mine

Can you describe your amp set up too? I can see a Vox and a SWR, but are you playing both at the same time, for each side of the Stick?

Nice shoe on the fourth photo, Doc Marteen's rules!!!

I've added a description of the pedals used for the latest photo.
The one next to the StepABout is the Pigtronix Mothership which is a new analog synth. Check out the song "Knot Ahead" on my Myspace page for a sound demo...


I mainly use the VOX AC30 for both bass and melody strings. Thanks to the StepABout I pass the sound through two effect chains which I "monoize" again just before the volume pedal. From the volume I go mono into the amp. The SWR is a small practicing amp I do not use for "real playing".

Best,
TheMM

Very cool, man. Being that I am a fan of the Pigtronix stuff, I am wondering how you already have the Mothership guitar synth. I guess there are a few prototypes floating around.

To that end, seeing has peaked my curiousity about how it sounds. What do you you find yourself using it for most? Bass or Melody or both?

Steve

MM, don't you have some tone loss issue with al that gear?
I've noticed some brightness and 'ooomph' loss when the signal comes through all my pedals, even if they are disengaged (and I've only a few compared to you), and it drives me crazy to lose the richness of the sound of the couple Stick/StepABout.
The only pedals that keep the dynamics of the signal are the Eventide's Timefactor and Modfactor (but they both have some issue of another kind).
Bruno

Interesting. I have noticed this as well. I notice that when I put all pedals in the bypass position, the tone is unreal, but once I engage my EH Holy Grail reverb, it sort of trails off a bit. I never had an issue such as this before using floor based effects units. My last rig was all rackmounted and I had no issue with tone loss or levels changing regardless of what unit/patch I was using.

Steve

You will probably find that a lot of the lower-end effects (compared with say Eventide, etc...) will have the high-end tapered off to help reduce hiss. EH for example used to be known for being noisy f/x - really cool ones but noisy in any case. No doubt that the high-end of the Stick signal is going to suffer from this as well. Something you can try and do is add a bit of pre-emphasis to the high-end going into the f/x chain. Of course if you bypass the f/x in the chain and forget to bypass the pre-emphasis it might be a bit too brite.

Dave

I actually notice it more with the lower frequencies. It could be idicative of the way I have it set up too. I do not utilize either channel on the Stepabout as a 'clean' channel. This is my current configuration.

Channel 1 (Bass) --> EH Holy Grail --> EH memory Man
Channel 2 (Melody) --> Disnortion --> Envelope Phaser --> Echolution

I go back and forth about whether or not I even need the Reverb, that is until I want to deepen the effect of one of my delays. I almost always use A on both channels for the reverb and augment the melody side with other various combonations. I love the Echolution, but it seems that to get what I am looking for, I have to use reverb. Should this be true? The repeats are somewhat inaudible without the reverb engaged.

Trying not to hi-jack (but failing),
Steve

To not hijack this topic (it's very easy when it comes to discuss gear...), we should open a new one elsewhere, unless MM authorizes us to discuss pedalboard on his topic