A little south of Nowhere's-Ville, there is a tiny cottage that houses a weird black lab and an even weirder composer. If you were to walk along the meandering creek that runs fast around the place you would hear strange music emanating from the cottage, music that moves among areas of angular dissonance, textural soundscapes and full blown shredding.

Right now I am re-designing my pedal board for the current iteration of the band. I vacillate among several states; having no pedals at all (usual state), to incorporating a few, then to having a HUGE pedal board. During that sequence of events there are many tearing sounds as velcro-ed pedals get torn off and re-positioned and minute details like having a buffer before a wah, or after, or between a wah and a fuzz are posited, researched (You-tube time) and experimented upon.

It is hard to achieve a perfect balance between sonic variation and onstage usability, especially on the budgets I work with (read NO budgets at all). Nevertheless, I am close to having a pedal board that works well. It is by no means finished, but the basic infrastructure is there. Let me detail the set-up.

To begin with, one of the biggest problems with guitar effects, especially those that have a lot of knobs and tones, is tweakability. On the test-bench there is no problem, but onstage it becomes a major one. Say that you use an analog delay pedal and you want to alter the knobs in real time to create a wee bit of sonic mayhem. If the pedal is on the floor, then you need to crouch down, squint (at least I do) and spend an inordinate amount of onstage time hunched over your pedal board. Not only does it look weird, it also irks me that thousands of dollars of pedals are put on the floor getting dusty and trod upon (I guess they come by the nick-name "stomp box" honestly).

There are options of course; mostly expensive and mostly for digital pedals where different parameters can be controlled by OTHER pedals attached to the main one. You can use an expression pedal to control a set parameter, or use another pedal to switch between several pre-programmed states. These options do work, but they never are as powerful as twisting knobs and, in the case of the analog delay mentioned earlier, there really is no alternative but to bend over and tweak onstage. It seems silly. The other option is to have one pedal for one sound only and get yet another one for any other tonal variation. That seems sillier still but explains why so many pedal boards get HUGE quickly.

Over the years I have migrated pedals from the floor up onto a platform (a music stand) that allows me to tweak the knobs by hand. It is so much easier to adjust a delay parameter in real time while playing, than to plod about looking for the expression pedal on a dark stage, and hoping it is still connected to the parameter you actually want to adjust.

In order to do that though, I have had to populate my pedal boards with a lot of boxes that don't anything other than turn things on and off. I will explain my signal path and you can see what I mean.

From the guitar I go into the tiny floor pedal board.

That is "Effect Chain One". In it is a wah pedal (a Morley Wah-volume which is probably the pedal I have used most over the years, having bought my first one way back in 1977; in fact I think it is the very first effect pedal I ever bought.) Then to a boss tuner, then to a MXR overdrive-boost pedal (which given its associations to a snake-referred purchase has, through no fault of its own, a VERY negative connotation and is destined to be swapped out soon). That chain can be bypassed by a quick stomp on a Road Rage loop pedal. The beauty of this set-up is I can have my wah pedal cocked to a position I like going into my distortion and turn them both on at one go. The pedal order is the result of MUCH experimenting and I find it gives me the best sound.

On the floor board is also a Gig Rig Remote Loopy II, which turns on two other loops remotely. They are "Effect Chain Two" and "Effect Chain Three".

In "Effect Chain Two" is a EHX Ring Thing and an EHX Small Stone Phaser. The Ring Thing has an expression pedal plugged in so that I might control seperate parameters on a patch by patch basis (the Ring Thing has 9 presets and one WYSIWYG setting). It is fundamentally a ring modulater, but is equally a trem pedal and harmoniser. It does all of these things splendidly. The phaser is a pretty standard thing and used seldomly but is fun to set to crazy settings and does offer a lot of tonal variation. The fact they are both on the music stand means I can reach over and tweak any control easily and in real time.

In "Effect Chain Three" is a TC Electronics Echo Brain analog delay and a Hall of Fame 2 digital reverb. They both have a lot of knobs that get tweaked a lot. I can get any number of sounds from them with ever having to run through presets (the delay has no presets but the reverb has 11). It is so much easier to adjust the delay setting to tempo with a quick twist of the wrist than to tap it on a excruciatingly small tap tempo stomp box. Of course the analog delay doesn't even allow that anyway so...

That is the basic rig, but I am currently awaiting a few more pedals to include into the fray.
In EC1, I will swap out the MXR for a Rat2 (I LOVE Rat pedals and wished I had never sold my 1985 Rat) and add a EHX Nano Looper 360 at the end of that chain.  In EC2 I will add an EHX Mono Synth pedal (it will be the first in the chain) and a Tube Screamer clone (probably a...Behringer clone!) between the Ring Thing and the Small Stone. In EC3 I will add another looper (TC Electronic's Ditto) at the very end of the whole path and it will reside on the floor. I would also like to add an EHX Attack-Decay and a Grand Canyon into Chain 3 but space and budget are a problem there.

With the EHX looper at the end of chain one, I can basically get it to act like a step sequencer into the Mono Synth and Ring Thing, allowing me a pretty cool modular synth type set-up. With a Ditto at the very end of the entire path, I can record an effected step sequence (say a guitar figure looped by the nano, sent into the Mono Synth and Ring Thing and tweaked in real time) and then play over it. I am hardly a fan of solo artists building up layered loops one by one, but given the nature of the current line-up and our analog synth paradigm, this seems a cool way to incorporate synth sequences and arpeggiated patterns into a guitar-based "synth" set-up.

So that is basically it.

To sign-off I will include a picture of the weird black lab I mentioned earlier.