Tone Talk

Filing this from the day-job desk before Johnny can stop me. I pulled the preset logs on my own board this month — every reverb patch I actually recalled twice in the last year was a spring or a plate. Two algorithms. The other twenty-eight exist so the demo video has chapters. Algorithm count is the pedal industry's megapixel war: a spec that photographs well and correlates with nothing you'll do at a gig. Before anyone says 'shimmer' — one use per year is a rental, not a purchase. Prove me wrong with a patch you recalled twice. Receipts, not vibes.

The Quad Cortex wins on routing and snapshots, but the TONEX One is annoyingly close for single-amp capture duty. I am trying to keep the whole rig under one carry-on and one backpack. Anyone running TONEX for the amp block and keeping QC purely for scenes, expression, and ambient spillover?

After the Blooper it makes every loop feel cinematic, but before the sampler it prints a more playable texture and stays out of the way live. Nylon guitar players: where are you putting the big ambient block when the loop itself is part of the arrangement?

PackRat wins when the song wants attitude. Halberd wins when the chords have extensions and the singer still needs space. Curious how people are stacking them. I keep landing on Halberd first, PackRat second, both set lower than expected.

Ran a Big Muff in front of the Twin for two years in Sextant. Loved it solo. The second I put it in a three-piece next to a drummer who actually hits the snare, it disappeared into the kick drum. All low-mid, no teeth. Tried EQing around it, tried running it cleaner, tried a different cab. Still mud. Switched to a RAT three months ago in Drop C# and I'm not going back. The mids it shoves into the room are exactly the frequencies a Jazzmaster wants to live in. I can leave the Twin's mid knob at 4 and the RAT does the work. With the filter knob about 11 o'clock it's still fuzzy as anything, just fuzzy on top of a defined note instead of fuzzy ON the note. Anyone else made the switch the other way? I want to be talked back into the Muff but every time I plug one in I just hear porridge.

I keep seeing people put a compressor at the END of their chain, after delay and reverb, as a 'limiter' to even out the mix. That's not what a guitar compressor does. That's what a studio bus comp does, and it's a completely different circuit. A guitar compressor (Ross, Dyna, Keeley clone, whatever) is a sustainer. It pushes up the tail of a note. You put it BEFORE drive, before chorus, before everything except maybe a tuner and a wah. Run it after a delay and you're sustaining the wet signal, which collapses your repeats into a single held tone. It's a mistake every time. Signal chain on my Jaguar -> AC15 rig: 1. Tuner 2. Compressor (Cali76) 3. Boost 4. Drive 5. Chorus (CE-2W) 6. Delay 7. Reverb Compress before chorus, never after. The chorus modulates pitch by milliseconds. If you compress that, you're flattening the modulation that's supposed to make the pedal work. Anyone running it differently and getting a result you actually like, I want to hear why.

List, with reasons. 1. Wah. Yes I know. Hear me out. I haven't used a wah on a session in five years and every time I plug one in for fun I remember why. The bypass is bad, the sweep range is wrong for almost every modern song, and the cocked-half-wah trick that everyone learned from the Brown Sound is a tonal cul-de-sac. If I need filter motion I use an envelope filter or automate a parametric in the mix. Cleaner result every time. 2. The MXR Carbon Copy. Specifically the original Carbon Copy. Beautiful pedal in theory, the modulation is gorgeous, but the moment you put it in a band mix the repeats vanish under any drive. I've replaced it with a TC Flashback and a Strymon Volante and I haven't missed it. People who love the Carbon Copy are playing it solo. In a band it's invisible. 3. Most boost pedals. Not all. But 80% of them. A clean boost into a tube amp does one thing: it pushes the front end harder. If your amp doesn't want to be pushed harder, the boost just makes things louder. I use a Klon for this and a Klon is not a boost, it's a tone shaper. A true clean boost has earned its slot on exactly one board I've ever built. Who's about to disagree, go ahead.

I bought a real Centaur in 2018, paid stupid money, and over the years I've A/B'd it against about a dozen clones at Wally's and at the school. Tumnus, Soul Food, Archer, KTR, Aion DIY, two boutique ones I won't name. Here's what nobody talks about: the clones get the circuit right. Most of them are electrically identical to the original. The schematic isn't a secret anymore. What they don't get right is the buffer. The Centaur has a specific input impedance and a specific output stage, and the way it loads your guitar's pickups is part of the sound. A lot of clones use a different op amp or skip the buffer stage to save board space. That's where you lose it. Plug a Strat into a real Klon at clean-boost settings and roll the volume down. The treble is still there. Do it through a Tumnus and the high end disappears the second you touch the volume knob. Is that worth four figures? For most people, no. Get a Tumnus, you'll be 92% of the way there. But if anyone tells you the clones are 'identical' they've never put them on the same board side by side. They're not. It's not the schematic, it's how the pedal loads the guitar.

A/B all three through a Princeton until one stays on the board. The cheapest one wins more often than I want to admit. The real Centaur edges it on the dynamic response — pick attack feels more responsive — but the gap is smaller than the price tag suggests. Anyone running a Tumnus Deluxe through a Vox? Curious if the bass cut on the Deluxe changes the calculus.

Got into a polite argument with the engineer on the last session about this. He wanted me to print bass with a small room reverb on it. I refused. Posting because I want to know if I'm being a snob or if I'm right. My position: bass is the foundation of the low end. Reverb on bass smears the attack and the tail across the kick drum's frequency range. The whole reason the mix is going to feel tight is because the bass and kick are clean and aligned. Any reverb on the bass during tracking is a decision that can't be undone in mixing. If the producer wants a washy bass in the final mix, they can add a parallel reverb buss in post and high-pass it at 200Hz. That way I keep my dry low end and they get their texture. But printing reverb on the source signal is committing to a mistake you can't unmake. The bass is louder when you play less of it. The bass is also louder when you don't blur it. Am I being old-fashioned? Has anyone here printed bass with reverb and not regretted it?

Held up for three years, gigged it. Pedaltrain or build something custom? Show me your unreasonable boards. The cardboard finally gave out at a load-in last week. The Klon survived, the box did not. Looking at either a Pedaltrain Classic 2 or building a hinged ply board with two tiers.

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