Rig Diaries

Masthead fight, round 2. Jason's whole doctrine is buy the cheap version, prove the need, upgrade if it earns it. Here's what actually happens: you buy the $79 clone, discover the knob taper is wrong, buy the $149 mid-tier, discover the mids are plastic, and land on the $349 original eighteen months and $228 later — worse, you learned the song wrong on the way. The expensive pedal was the cheap path the whole time. And boutique holds resale: my worst buy-once mistake cost me forty bucks on the way out. The clone graveyard in my closet cost more than that in shipping.

The trick was treating it like a low guitar, not a small bass. Less sub than instinct says, more 700 Hz than feels polite. Signal is Bass VI -> BassRig Super Vintage -> Microtubes Infinity with the blend barely awake. The OC-5 only comes in for choruses.

The Milkman keeps the low strings together better than the combo amps I tried. The surprise is how much the Barbershop does before the heavy stuff. Life Pedal comes on for the wide parts, but the always-on tone is just compressor -> Barbershop -> TONEX One. Very boring, very usable.

The board is boring by design. Stomp handles amp/cab and modulation, Flint stays physical because I trust the switches, Nano POG handles the one song that needs the trick. The real win is the MC6 Pro. Setlists, tuner mute, tap, snapshots, and panic button without menu-diving.

Six months ago I split the Ricky 330 into two AC30s in stereo and posted about it on the old board. Here's the update. Rewards: chords have a depth nothing mono can replicate. The high E on amp A and the low E on amp B with the middle strings split between them, you hear chord voicings differently. I am writing better songs because I can hear the inside of them. The recordings I've made this year are the best of my career. Regrets: the rig is a logistical disaster. Two AC30s is 50kg of amp before I touch the board. Both amps need biasing simultaneously or the stereo image drifts. When one tube goes microphonic only one side hears it and you spend an hour troubleshooting the wrong amp. Two power cables, two cab miking solutions, two of every cable I own. Would I undo it? No. Would I recommend it to a working musician on tour? Absolutely not. The split is a Lehle Little Dual into one effects chain that's mono and then splits to two stereo modulations and stereo delay and stereo reverb. The mod/time stuff is what justifies the rig. If you split mono pedals you've doubled the cost of your board for nothing. If the room can't tell, you haven't gone far enough. The room can tell.

Tore the whole thing down Saturday because I just swapped a Strat for a '60s Tele Custom and the board I had dialed for the Strat sounded wrong with the Tele. Same room, same amp, different guitar, and the room sounds wrong now. Here's what changed: the Strat liked the boost in front, the Tele wants it in the loop. The Strat liked a slight chorus on cleans, the Tele wants none. And the reverb amount that was perfect on the Strat is suddenly washing out the Tele's high end. So I rebuilt: pulled the chorus, moved the boost to the loop, dropped the reverb mix from 35 to 20. Played for two hours last night. Still doesn't sound right. The Tele has this honk in the upper mids that the Strat didn't, and now nothing on the board addresses it. Considering a parametric mid-cut, considering a different amp, considering selling the Tele. I'm posting because I know someone in here is going to tell me 'the answer is the amp not the board'. Tell me the answer is the board. I just rebuilt the board.

I know how this sounds. Hear me out. The three reverbs on the board were: a Holy Grail Plus for room, a Big Sky for hall and shimmer, and a Catalinbread Topanga for spring. They each had a job. Then I started writing a piece that needed a reverb that didn't sound like a reverb, more like the air after a reverb stopped. A reverb that you can't tell is on until you turn it off. Fourth reverb is a Meris Mercury 7 set at 100% wet, low decay, low diffusion, fed only from the send of the Big Sky's output. It's a reverb on a reverb. When the song is loud you can't hear it. When the song stops you hear the room continuing for two seconds beyond the actual reverb tail. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Does it sound like anything else? No. If you can hear the guitar, the reverb isn't on yet. Mustang into AC10, board is now: fuzz, fuzz, Holy Grail, Big Sky, Topanga, Mercury 7. Anyone else stacking reverbs and finding the stack is the instrument?

Got asked at a session last week to walk through the board. Figured I'd post it here. LP into a Twin, 12 pedals, every one earns one knob, the rest stays off. 1. Peterson Strobostomp. Knob: bypass. 2. Cali76 comp. Knob: ratio. 3. Klon KTR. Knob: gain. 4. Tumnus Deluxe. Knob: treble. (yes, two Klons. They do different jobs.) 5. Timmy. Knob: gain. 6. RAT. Knob: filter. 7. Big Muff Op-Amp reissue. Knob: tone. 8. Tone Bender clone. Knob: attack. 9. Boss CE-2W. Knob: rate. 10. EHX Memory Toy. Knob: feedback. 11. Strymon Timeline. Knob: mix. 12. Strymon Big Sky. Knob: decay. The rule is: one pedal does one job. If two pedals would do similar jobs they have to be settable at completely different points. The KTR is at low gain for clean push. The Tumnus is at higher gain for a creamier breakup. Different pedals. People ask me why three fuzzes. Because RAT, Muff, and Tone Bender are three different fuzz shapes and on session dates I need to be able to nail whatever the producer asks for in 30 seconds. They each earn their slot. If anyone wants to argue any of these come off the board, go ahead.

Three reverbs in series, the second is a Big Sky cathedral set wrong on purpose. The "wrong" is the whole thing. The trick is the dotted-eighth + quarter combo running into a parallel reverb buss, not a series one. Most YouTube tutorials get the buss topology wrong.

It shouldn't work. The Sovtek before the Klon should muddy everything. Instead the Klon cleans it up like a compressor that knows what fuzz is. Running it through a '72 Jazzmaster RI into a Twin Reverb. The combination is unreasonably articulate. Anyone else flipped the usual fuzz-after-overdrive order and ended up somewhere better?

Picked up the '72 Twin a week ago specifically to put the Türünz oud through it. The Twin doesn't know it's an oud amp. That's the joke. It thinks it's amplifying a Strat and treats every note like one. The oud doesn't sustain like an electric and the Twin's headroom means the picking dynamics come through completely. Every right-hand articulation is audible. What I didn't expect: the Twin's reverb tank, which I was going to bypass and replace with a pedal, is exactly the right size for the oud's natural decay. The reverb on 3 sounds like the oud is being played in a small wooden room. Anything higher and it's a different instrument. Problems so far: the pickup I had on the oud is too hot for the Twin's input. First gain stage breaks up before I want it to. Solution might be a transformer DI to drop the level. Or move to a quieter contact mic. Also the upper sympathetic strings are getting eaten by the amp's natural high-mid voicing. I don't want to EQ this on the amp because I like everything else about how the amp sounds. Considering a passive EQ in front to dip the 2.5kHz region. Open to any suggestions from anyone who's amplified a fretless or oddly-tuned instrument.

Counterintuitive board: nothing maxed, nothing off. Each pedal contributes exactly one knob's worth of personality. The Klon at noon does almost nothing audibly, but bypass it and the whole board flattens. Same with the CE-2W. They're the connective tissue that makes the load-bearing pedals (Muff, RAT, DD-8) actually sit in a mix.