As reminder, check out my YouTube channel for lots more quality Electric Trumpet content! Here’s the jam of 2017 so far that’s had the most replay value for me personally, a stretched out version of the Herb Alpert classic “Rise” which has great pacing and grooves:
It’s been about a year, time for another update on the electric trumpet pedalboard.
Here’s the current effects chain (photo from Breakfast 8):
Boss OC-2 octave
Eventide Pitchfactor
Source Audio SA143 bass envelope
Morley Power Wah
Dr. Scientist BitQuest (rental)
Damage Control Liquid Blues
Moog Minifooger Ring Modulator**
Saturnworks A/B splitter
A chain:
Maestro PH-1 Phaser
Moog Bass MuRF
TC Electronic Flashback delay
Source Audio Lunar Phaser**
B chain:
TC Electronic Mimiq Doubler (rental)
Damage Control Glass Nexus
Strymon BigSky Reverberator**
Strymon Mobius Modulation (rental)
** denotes a new permanent addition. The BigSky Reverberator is quite magnificent and deserves its own post. Lunar Phaser was so good I did end up buying one and it’s given me some great moments. BitQuest is also a super unique pedal although I have struggled to make it sing since it’s control scheme is tough to dial in on the fly.
Well 2016 is drawing to a close at last and I think I can speak for many people in saying it was a downright lousy year, to put it nicely. There’s a lot I could complain about but I’m trying to stay focused on the positive. I’ve been playing a bunch of music and that’s been one of the best things going on in my life this year. For my own clarity/later reference I compiled a list of the effects pedals I’ve been renting from Pedal Genie and I figured why not post it here. The list is organized by the date of the shipment of the rental pedals, and includes the list of recording sessions I held during the time I was using those pedals. I had 21 multi-track recording sessions in 2016 with the last 4 of those recorded in 24bit/96kHz which is something I’ve always wanted to do, recently enabled by a PC upgrade to the recording rig. We also had 1 live show and 1 video shoot with a live cameraman. From that video shoot came my personal favorite cornet performance of the year (in terms of expressiveness and execution), on “I Thought It Was You” by Herbie Hancock. Check it out:
2/23/17 sessions: Breakfast 34 (Denver), 3/19 (Heterodyne) || Acropolis 4/23 (Rise), 6/11 ||
Strymon Möbius Modulation Multieffects
Dr. Scientist BitQuest (low-fi multieffect)
TC Electronic Mimiq Doubletracker
10/28/16 sessions: Acropolis 11/13 (Hang Up/96k), 1/15 (Ribbons, K.Cake) || Super Risky Clique 11/27 || Fistbump III 12/11 || George R. Brown
Strymon BigSky Reverberator
Catalinbread Heliotrope
Empress Phaser
7/7/16 sessions: Acropolis 7/17 (Instant Ice) || Stretch Coast 8/13 (Disco Fred) || POACB 8/14 (Fiddy) || Fistbump II 10/23
DOD Gonkulator Ring Mod
Source Audio SA241 Lunar Phaser
Keeley Super Mod Workstation
5/2/16 sessions: YVJ trio 5/14 || JJP trio 5/21 || Scalding 6/11 || Breakfast 6/25 (Brain) || Fistbump 7/2 (America)
Moog Minifooger MF Flange
Pigtronix EP2 Envelope Phaser
Dr Scientist The Tremoloessence
3/2/16 sessions: Extraterrestrial 3/13 || Acropolis 4/9 (scrapped) || Breakfast 4/10 (Seahorse Carol)
Boss TE-2 Tera Echo
Moog MF Ring Mod
Keeley 6 Stage Phaser
12/4/15 sessions: Acropolis 12/6 (Fallbrook), 1/24, 1/31 (P-996) || Bok 1/17 || Breakfast 1/30 (Monsieur) || Phosphene 2/21
TC Electronics HOF Reverb
Source Audio SA126 Bass Envelope
9/28/15 sessions: Antidote 11/15
Walrus Audio Janus Tremolo Fuzz
Electro Harmonix Bad Stone Phaser+
Mad Professor Snow White Bass Autowah
7/3/15 sessions: Acropolis 7/24, 8/9, 8/23 (Telemetry), 9/27 (dub)
Chase Bliss Audio Warped Vinyl
Infanem Small Echo Array
Red Panda Particle Delay
5/11/15 sessions: 100% Juice 5/15, 5/22 (Beatles), 6/27-28 || Acropolis 5/14, 6/11
Electro Harmonix Super Pulsar Tremolo
SolidGoldFX Funkzilla Envelope+
4/3/15 sessions: 100% Juice 4/3 (RC), 4/25 (Hollywood) || Acropolis 4/23, 5/7 || Fresh Squeezed 4/18
SolidGoldFX Apollo Phaser+
Voodoo Lab Wahzoo
3/2/15 sessions: 100% Juice 3/14 (Sunset Drink)
TC Electronics Flashback x2 Delay
Caroline Icarus Boost
Fulltone Clyde Delux Wah
It occurred to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve done an update on the electric trumpet pedalboard and posted about it on here, although I’ve been busy using it. A few aspects of the setup have evolved since I posted the last signal chain and there’s been many rental pedals in the interim as well.
Here’s the chain, as of March 2016:
Boss OC-2 octave
Eventide Pitchfactor
Source Audio SA143 bass envelope
Morley Power Wah
Damage Control Liquid Blues
Malekko BIT sample rate reducer
Keeley 6-stage Phaser (rental)
Moog Minifooger Ring Modulator (rental)
A/B splitter
A chain:
Line 6 DL4 delay modeler/looper
Maestro PH-1 Phaser
Moog Bass MuRF
TC Electronic Flashback delay
Line 6 MM4 modulation modeler
B chain:
Boss TE-2 Tera Echo (rental)
Damage Control Glass Nexus
I moved the OC-2 back to first in the chain because it needs a raw signal to track well. The Pitchfactor can still track the output while the OC-2’s active just fine, although the inverse is not true. The purple envelope is new and it rocks. More on that…
The Source Audio SA143 Pro Bass Envelope:
At last, this is the envelope that I’ve been searching for. It’s got a fast, responsive filter, a ton of variability thanks to the knobs, and I can save six presets. These presets are valuable because like the SolidGoldFX Funkzilla, this pedal includes an LFO (oscillator) which can control the filter. That makes for a lot of possibilities.
Source Audio found ways to bury a ton of functionality inside this pedal. The center display shows an EQ which can be used to tweak the timbre of the filter but more interestingly, if you press the two black buttons to the right of it, the function of that display changes, allowing you to access the “backpage” parameters. Most of these simply control expression input but two of them are very juicy: one, the Q of the filter which changes it from mellow to insane and two, the shape of the waveform used by the LFO. There’s a good selection of waves to choose from. I created a laserbeam sound by using a high Q and an upward sawtooth wave, a step filter (at last I have one!) by using the random waveform with a medium Q, and a third, crazy setting that sounds like beeping robots and computers by using the random waveform and a high Q. This pedal is rife with creative potential if you take the time to play with it.
Digging deeper into the Eventide Pitchfactor:
If there is one pedal that’s truly bottomless on my board, it’s definitely the Eventide Pitchfactor. The Pitchfactor does need some one on one time with the player before trying to use it in context if you want to milk the most interesting effects out of it though. I have taken 3 sessions now sitting down with it and creating some custom presets for myself which is really where the magic happens. Initially I covered the basics with a 5ths harmonizer, a pitchflex mode that allows for +2 octave bends with the expression pedal (which I have surprisingly used a ton), and a four part harmonizer. Second time around I added a few more basic modes and dual-delay with a long repeat time that ascends sub-chromatically in frequency each time the delays repeat, which is super unique.
Most recently I created a few new presets that take advantage of the other modes I have not been using on this pedal. I added a synth setting although for whatever reason the synth seems to have the worst lag of all the modes in this pedal so we’ll see how useful it turns out to be. Next up was an arppegiator which might be neat in the right moment, especially looped. Finally I added another ascending delay that climbs up the whole tone scale as it repeats, inspired by a video of the Earthquaker Devices “Rainbow Machine” pedal. This whole-tone ascending thing was what I had originally set out to create when I built the previous sub-chromatic ascending delay. What I had discovered by accident was just so cool that I forgot to complete what I was actually trying to do!
Do I like this or not? The Boss Tera Echo TE-2:
I can’t decide what to think about this guy. It has generated a lot of buzz for a Boss pedal since the aim here was to combine reverb and delay into one pedal which was a low-cost attempt to reach for a sound like you get with the Strymon BigSky (the descendant of my Glass Nexus reverb/delay). The Tera Echo does get a “big” sound through a mono amplifier when you’re in the room with it, but since I record in stereo, direct from the pedalboard into a mixer, I can listen to it on headphones and hear exactly what it really sounds like in comparison to all the other things in my arsenal.
Inside the headphones it’s surprisingly… small. It gives a long-trail reverb wash but in terms of stereo soundstage when you compare it to the TC electronics reverbs/delays it’s not anywhere close in grandeur. It also has some kind of bandpass bump in its frequency response that gets tiring to me after a while. You can clearly tell when the Tera Echo is in use, as opposed to the other delays/reverbs I also use. Which maybe pidgeonholes it–a distinctive sound that you can’t change all that much. I will say that it does have a killer knob twist squeal when you change the delay time knob. That was a lot of fun. But ultimately this pedal feels like too much of a one-trick pony, ‘there-it-is-again’ type of effect.
Phaser Malaise:
I am apparently lucky to be spoiled with exquisite phasing, since I have pitted several very high end phasers against the Maestro PH-1 and all of them fall short. The latest is the Keeley 6-stage phaser. Before that was the Electro-Harmonix Bad Stone reissue, and the SolidGoldFX Apollo. The Apollo did sound uniquely great with the random LFO driving it but again, the phasing itself clearly did not sound as good as the Maestro. In the last session I still had it, I did figure out that slow movement of the Apollo expression pedal input did yield some deep textural shifts that sounded excellent with reverb and delay giving it a wash. Idunno, I keep thinking there has to be a lusher, more Steve Miller-ish, more Tame Impala-esque phaser out there for me, but I keep trying and failing to find it. Perhaps I should be looking for a flanger or something along those lines.
The TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb:
Since I had such an excellent experience with the TC Flashback delay, I decided I needed to check out his partner in ethereal crime, the HOF reverb. The Flashback blew my socks off in terms of the sheer size of it’s soundscape and I would say the HOF was almost right there with it. Maybe not quite as large, but not too far behind. This pedal presents an impressive array of reverb styles, which was very fun to scroll through and try on my own, but left me with the question, how many of these would actually be distinguishable if you were changing between modes during a jam session? I suppose you could ask the same question when it comes to the Flashback’s many delay types, but I do think the differences are even more subtle when it comes to ‘verb, in the midst of an actual song.
That said, if I didn’t already have the superb reverb of the Damage Control Glass Nexus, I’d be swayed by this pedal. Obviously many people are because I saw a recent list of the 10 top-selling pedals of 2015 and this was near the top. Deservedly so. I tell you, if TC Electronic ever made an all-in-one multi-effects unit that combined the HOF, Flashback, and a smattering of their many modulators, now that would be very difficult to resist. Multi-effects typically means an inferior version of 20 different things, but I gotta hand it to TC, they make excellent stuff.
Moog Ring Modulator:
Ok, now this thing rocks. I have a ring mod on my Line 6 MM-4, but like everything the MM-4 does, it’s not as rich as the real McCoy of whatever effect you’re talking about. On the most recent jam as of this writing, I threw this ring mod all over the place and it produced some crazy, impressive sounds. I keep coming back to the Billy Cobham album “Spectrum” which has a ton of ring modulator on it and this Moog version comes closer to that “get him away from the knobs, he’s out of control!” type of feeling than anything the MM-4 has given me. Although that’s not a surprise given that it’s a Moog pedal. I would enjoy having this guy around full time although with great power comes great responsibility. It’s hard to use this in moderation since it’s just so goofy and fun. Maybe I should not have this much power. I’m still not sure yet.
Walrus Audio Janus Fuzz/Tremolo:
This pedal was a letdown for me. Obviously, its ULTRA cool looking. It’s got graphics and two huge joysticks; you take one look at it and it screams ‘how could this not kickass?!’ Well at least on the trumpet, I don’t think it kicks ass. Two reasons why: one is that I have never been a big fan of distortion/overdrive/fuzz on the horn. Unlike guitar, I think trumpet should project its natural tone and I’ve never heard a distortion that took that tone into a differently-interesting direction. This was no different. And two, the tremolo joystick control was a wasted opportunity: vertical axis controlled wet/dry and horizontal axis controlled speed. Speed is great, but damn, couldn’t they have made the vertical axis waveform shape?! That would have made this thing like 20x more interesting. Opportunity missed. I have also used a lot of tremolos and I wasn’t blown away by the sound of the trem itself. I’ll chock this one up as another example of “here’s a pedal that guitar players seem to go nuts over, but I can’t make it do anything special on trumpet”. That seems to happen a lot. You can also include in this list the Chase Audio Warped Vinyl, The Red Panda Particle Delay, and others. I know, I know. Those pedals are practically worshiped. But for me, they didn’t deliver. These are the lessons that I’m learning through Pedal Genie.
I had also tried the Mad Professor Snow White Bass Auto Wah but found that it was both too slow in terms of speed and too tame in terms of the filter Q to give the proper tone that I wanted. Prior to that I had tried the Voodoo Labs Wahzoo which combines a wah, a step filter, and an autowah into a single package. Cool idea but again the frequency content of trumpet was not a match with what that pedal was trying to do. Although the lowest note on a conventionally tuned guitar is E2, 82.4Hz it seems that many pedals are voiced to have the ‘meat’ of their frequency content much higher than that. In my own setup I often favor the “bass” version of a pedal if the maker has two versions. Nowhere was this better illustrated to me than on the Voodoo Labs Wahzoo, which seemed like a very alluring treadle box on paper. However the autowah was not even able to trigger at all on the trumpet! No matter what setting I used, the autowah did literally nothing at all.
The Infanem Small Echo Array was a unique concept–it has four separate delays which are all based off the same speed. Dialing up each of the individual four delays produces different rhythmic patterns. That was pretty neat.
So there you have it. Tons of effects were tried, lots of things were learned and hopefully some sweet music got made along the way. I should post updates like this more often that summarize my findings (note to self). Another thing I want to do sometime soon is create a video about the macro-level philosophy of playing horn with effects and why my setup has evolved into what it is now. But that’s for another day…
Here’s a few more photos to document the transitory pedalboard setup of the month. I’ve continued borrowing pedals from the fantastic service PedalGenie.com and this month I’m enjoying three new ones: 1. The SolidGold FX Apollo Phaser 2. The SolidGold FX Funkzilla envelope filter and 3. The Electro Harmonix Pulsar Tremolo. Here’s an overall shot of the board as she appeared for the 5/15/15 and 5/22/15 sessions:
A few observations about each:
1. The SolidGold FX Apollo Phaser is a decent-to-good phaser packed with some totally amazing features. What I mean by that is, purely as a phaser, I still prefer the 1970s Maestro Phaser also seen in the overall photo, BUT the Apollo has some super creative ways of applying the phase that I’ve never seen on another phaser. First off, you can connect an expression pedal and use it to control the position of the phase combination. They describe it as an interesting take on the wah, but since a phaser is totally different than an envelope I’m going to say that the similarity ends with the fact that both are controlled by your foot. This was the feature that drew me to the pedal and I will say that it delivered, conceptually, on what I envisioned when I read the description. In use, the expression control seems to be subtle in the context of a full band. Turning up the resonance of the filter makes it cut a bit harder, and it is quite captivating to mess around with. Matter of fact I have held onto this one from PedalGenie for two months to give myself more time to see what plays out with this expression pedal control.
It took me a while to figure it out, but the expression pedal control is best used slowly, to create a textural metamorphosis rather than quickly, like you’d “waka-chicka” on a wah. With that approach a ‘bigger’ sound is yielded, one which allows more subtlety to come out. Surprisingly, in the context of improvisation the feature I find myself reaching for more than the expression pedal control is the randomizer function, which bounces the phase position all over whimsically. This, combined with the tap tempo control allows you to create a rhythmic texture that sounds similar to a step filter. I really like that effect. The randomizer and the expression control both do a lot to make this pedal something special. I know I am going to miss this one a lot when it’s gone.
2. The SolidGold FX Funkzilla Envelope Filter–with a name like that, how could it be bad?! It might be the coolest looking pedal I’ve ever seen with the Godzilla graphic and the sparkly purple paint job. It also has expression pedal input although I couldn’t seem to make it do much that felt interesting. Last month I had tried the Voodoo Labs Wahzoo pedal which is a wah, step filter, and autowah all in one. Regretfully the attack range of the autowah on that pedal was simply out of range for what my trumpet produces, and it literally did nothing. So the Funkzilla is the autowah sound I was wishing for! When you play a very fast phrase you can feel it getting slightly behind on its attack but for the most part it keeps up well even through brisk phrases. This sound is a lot of fun.
The first session I Funkzilla’d (YES!) I had the ‘Zil after the wah pedal which I think was a mistake. On the second one I used it before the wah, which allows me to slowly sculpt the tone without losing the Funkzilla filter attack. So this guy belongs early in the signal chain I think.
One thing I despise about both of these SolidGold FX pedals is the footswitches they use are hard as a rock and click very loudly when you engage them. Even if I was a guitarist and these were on the floor, I think I’d still dislike that. In our recordings you can hear them click on and off loud and clear. Why anyone would prefer this type of a switch, I do not understand. I’m very biased since most of my pedals reside at waist height and I actuate them with my hands, but were I to buy either of these pedals, I think I would open them up and rip out these awful switches to replace them with soft ones.
3. The Electro Harmonix Pulsar Tremolo is the most complicated tremolo I’ve ever seen. Complexity is a double edged sword of course, and I feel like I’m stumbling through hallways in the vast mansion of what it can truly do. Right away the coolest feature seems to be the fact that this tremolo offers a few rhythmic patterns besides a constant on/off cycle. Those patterns can also be adjusted to have a different attack with the waveform style knob, swapping from a hard-edged square wave to a smoother triangle wave, to the smoothest sine wave setting. There is a ton of variety in here. I’m blown away by the possibilities that it offers but I’m also left wondering how many people ever touch the bottom on this thing. One dangerous aspect of a very complicated pedal is when you’re in the heat of a cool moment and you reach for it, expecting, you know, a tremolo–but instead it’s still set to that weird-ass setting from earlier in the jam that you were playing around with and was cool at the time but is totally out of place now. The Eventide Pitch Factor has burned me a few times in the same way. Awesome pedals, and they do so much, but they demand your attention to really control them.
4. The TC Electronic Flashback Delay–I got this pedal as a loaner from PedalGenie and I liked it so much that I had to actually buy one to keep full time. This now makes 3 (yes, three) delay pedals on the board, which is getting a little bit ridiculous, but wow, it has such a tremendously big soundstage when used in stereo that I was instantly hooked to it. Vince (our guitarist) commented on a portion of our jam “that’s quite a trumpetscape”… any pedal that can coin a new word deserves consideration as a permanent member, I think. Besides it’s giant stereo field which immediately makes it presence known, the Flashback also has a host of varied sounds which each have their own appeal. I’ve been digging the LoFi mode and the Ping Pong most of all, but the mod has quite a pleasing modulation sound as well. And the Tone Print setting lets you add in pretty much anything else you can think of using the very comprehensive editor which runs on your PC and transfers new settings over via USB. That’s a brilliant idea.
So full-time TrumpetScape™ Technology is now on hand and life is good. Having these extra pedals around is a lot of fun and stimulating.
So it looks like I have the ability to embed audio files, which is sweet! I should post more jams on here.
Here is a recent one (1/25/15) that’s a pleasurable odyssey based on the Steve Miller Band classic “Fly Like an Eagle”. The recording from this session had several issues, so this mastering leans heavily on the room mics. Don’t judge my audio quality here. But the playing is pretty awesome I think. I’ll call out my highlights to make it a more interesting listen:
start-2:45 guitar driven intro opens it up
3:50 some cool delay time changes while playing, culminating at 4:02 (these knob turns produce a high pitch sound that’s like lasers or record scratches)
4:45 nice buildup into the guitar solo handoff
5:37 interesting scale/tonal guitar soloing
6:28+ bitrate distortion on the horn, most obvious at
7:20+ trumpet/bass/guitar all sync up on unison line, sweet descending bass chords at 8:13 while the guitar is pitched shifted up
10:07 intense bitrate dips on the horn, leading into huge guitar delay section
11:22 dynamics come way down for a nice chill section. Singing bowl taps come in at 11:33+
12:54+ slow guitar swells of new chords build into the next section, neat bass vibes
15:00 snare drum comes back, ending the slow buildup, 1/4 chord switch begins
16:21+ pretty happy with this soloing
17:11 phrase that jumps up/down, then 17:31 descending phrase that jumps down for final note: both these are “outside my box” figures that were gratifying to hear. New vocab.
18:34 meaty guitar punctuation that’s cool
19:28 first identifiable “into the future” riff from Fly Like An Eagle… I can trace tiny moments of the rhythm for a couple minutes prior but they are quite camouflaged
19:39 incredibly triumphant “Time keeps on slippin / into the future” this moment,oh yeah. And the switch to the 4 chord halfway through seals the deal.
21:06 very mysterious, reverbed-out “into the future”
21:34 new feel on the drums opens up another chapter of the jam
21:52 cool descending guitar riffs with the Steve Miller “doot-doos” from the intro the to tune, using the harmonizer although faint
22:49 “Time keeps on slippin” with a totally unreasonable amount of delay
24:23 “most people think that / great god will come from the sky / take away everything / and make everybody feel high” Bob Marley quote, played with ascending notes instead of the way he actually sings it. Hard to hear this but I really enjoy it when listening
24:42+ cool repeating line on the guitar and varied staccato trumpet trickery; I really dig the complexity and the bounce through this section
25:48 drums switch over to hip-hop style rimshot feel. I’m a sucker for this type of groove. Open 5ths on the trumpet harmonizer
29:29 self-proclaimed “scale-wankery” on the guitar closes out the final section.
All in all, it’s a pretty killer jam with a lot of creative quoting and unusual choices in terms of the soloing phrases. And just because, here’s this awesome album cover with the “Fly Like An Eagle” theme to it, from an earlier session…
An update on the pedalboard I’ve been building:
As you can see in the image above, I’ve installed an aluminum sheet beneath the main board to act as a ground plane, hopefully to dampen any noise and RF interference from the power supply platform mounted below it. I’ve also rounded off the corners using my router and belt sander, then applied three coats of 2-in-1 stain+polyurethane, with two coats of a wipe-on poly after that. I liked the 2-in-1 but I’m not so sure that the wipe-on poly really added much. I didn’t really shoot for a mirror finish though.
The second image, below, shows the pedal setup for our session on 3-7-15. There are three new pedals here which I’m renting from PedalGenie.com, which is a brilliant service that loans out pedals for people who might want to experiment with different effects setups like myself.
The signal chain is:
Trumpet >
Eventide Pitchfactor >
Boss OC-2 Octave >
Morley Power Wah >
Fulltone Cylde Deluxe Wah (loaner) >
Caroline Icarus Clean Boost (loaner) >
Malekko Bit sample rate reducer >
A-B splitter forms two paths >
A: Damage Control Glass Nexus > Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler > Maestro Phaser > Damage Control Liquid Blues drive > Line 6 MM4 Modulation Modeler > Moog Bass MuRF >
B: TC Electronic Flashback delay (loaner, on its own signal path for evaluation) >
stereo summing pedal >
DI Box
(Also seen on the floor are an Ernie Ball expression pedal to control the Pitchfactor, and a generic Korg tap tempo to control the MuRF)
In tandem with the ongoing speakerbuilding project keeping my garage dusty, I’ve also been working on a custom pedalboard for my electrified trumpet setup. This was born out of necessity since I’ve outgrown the footprint of my hardshell Rockcase board, which itself is getting worn out from years of schlepping. I make take some time to recondition it for any music that happens outside my living room. But since I’m a lucky dude who mostly gets to jam at home, I’ve started working on this:
Yep, it’s a jungle of wires and nothing is securely attached at this point, it’s true. Consider this a “version 1.0” photo. My goals here are 1. to accomodate more pedals at waist height for easy manipulation 2. to achieve a cleaner signal by isolating the audio cables away from any power supplies and power cables and 3. to hopefully make it look nice?
As far as goal #1 (capacity), adding a second level was a slam dunk for me, which allows interactive pedals to be accessible on top and neccessary but non-interactive components to be stashed underneath. I’ve got a signal combiner and a DI box, both of which are key parts of my setup but neither of which need to be touched during an entire session, so these can be hidden away without taking up valuable real estate.
To achieve goal #2 (a cleaner signal), I have relocated the power bricks, 9v power supply, and the power strip all to beneath the pedalboard, on their own little board. Moving all that away from the pedals was the most important step. To go further, I have bought a thin sheet of aluminum, which will cover the bottom of the board and then be electrically connected to the ground pin of the power strip so that it can serve as a ground plane to shield against any residual noise from the power supplies beneath it and maybe dampen any local RF. That has not been installed yet. Finally, wiring is obviously a jungle at the moment, but ultimately I want to route all power cables thrugh holes in the board so they come in contact with the audio cables as little as possible. Interestingly, when I initially built the board, I had the elevated section on the right side, which I immediately realized was a terrible idea when I started to play in front of it for the first time–my LEFT hand is free to move knobs, not the right. So I’m not in a tremendous rush to make things permanent, since I want to try some experimentation to find the best physical location for as many of these pedals as I can. I’ll make a detailed breakdown of what I use at some point in the future. Haven’t gotten to that yet.
Making the board look good will be accomplished with wood stain and some stainless steel accents. And cleaning up that mess of cables! I’ll post another shot when she’s further along. For now, here’s my perspective when playing on it:
So I’m in a band and it’s called “100% Juice” and I think it’s preaaatty cool. If you like improvised, funky music or electrified horns, I think this is worth your listening time. I will post more as we create more.
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So far there are 5 tracks up on our Soundcloud although we’ve been playing for over a year now. We’re selective like that? The track “Freeze Pop” was recorded using a multi-track interface, the Tascam US-2000. I’m quite jazzed about the prospects of using this thing to make progressively better and better recordings of the music we’ve been making.
I will also mention here that if you REALLY like it, there is a continuously rotating directory which hosts our latest and greatest jams in long form, unabridged format, accessible as zip files. These are also the high-fidelity, sonically-best way of listening to us. You will hear a clear difference versus the streaming version. These can be found here:
