Pedals & Effect Layout

If you’ve read any of my posts since this blog started you’ll find I’ve gone through major setup change for my guitar sound. One of the biggest differences is how I use pedals. My main pedal requirements are different drive and gain pedals, I’m playing with a lot of variations on drive/fuzz/gain/boost pedals which give me both different sounds and variations while allowing my under lying tone to remain the same, due to not coming close to saturation any more.

As a result my pedal board has really stripped back to a few drive pedals and a boost pedal which is great for plugin and go type approach. I get the variations I want, however the sound is still the same root sound. This works well for me, but I’m also looking to vary things up sometimes. I’d like to have a more full sound option at my disposal, sometimes adding a little delay, univibe, chorus, tremolo, octavia style effects, would really work well. When recording this is fine as you can setup the pedals in the chain you want and record. When playing live this is a problem as you’ll either end up with a huge pedal board, with a controller like the gigrig device or doing a crazy tap dance with looper pedals. It’s also limiting as once you’ve used a pedal once, you can’t use it again on your board. I’m looking into building a midi-switched pedal based effects setup. This involves back lining all my pedals into a case by the amp, passing each pedal through a relay based switcher, programming the switcher with “patches” which can be a one pedal patch, or a combination of multiple pedals. The control of the signal chain through the switcher is done by a midi based foot controller.

Daniel and Sarah at The Gig Rig have been exceptionally helpful in providing information of how the Gig Rig pro 14 can be used as a midi controller. This is now allowing me to look for programmable relay based switching units. It has to be a programmable unit as the gig rig is a dumb controller, and it has to be relay based as this will keep the signal path clean. This is my first toe in the water for midi based pedal switching, the last midi unit I used was a rack based effects unit and it was poor, it put me off midi units for a long time. I’m also looking at a Custom Audio Electronics RS10 midi foot controller. This is pretty much the top end industry foot controller, with a little more brains under the hood, however it does come with a price tag to match another gig rig pro 14 controller, so if possible I’d like to not spend that money again. I’ll keep this blog updated with my midi back line pedal setup as it progresses. Input and comments welcome on this.