Monday, September 26, 2011

New Pedalboard

Hey folks. Thought I'd take a few minutes to talk about some new sounds I'm creating and show you the new board I've made. Lot's of cool new stuff going on. Hope you enjoy it.


First thing to mention is the new pedalboard. I got an artist endorsement with a pedalboard company in Nashville called Pro Stage Gear. They are most famous for their Pedaltrain pedalboards. They are lightweight, sturdy, easy to route and super affordable. You can even get them with ATA style road cases and still only spend a fraction of what other people are charging for boards. This is the PT-2. Measuring roughly 12x24 this was a considerable downsize from my Showcase board (16x32). I'm not super thrilled with how I've used the space above but I'm literally about to spend the next month and a half on the road and needed this put together as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I've got some super cool new pedals I want to talk about. The first one is the Eventide Space pedal (lower right corner.) This is the newest addition to the truly incredible lineup made by Eventide. It is essentially a studio quality reverb unit but with TONS more. I replaced my Eventide Timefactor digital delay with the Space because it has all kinds of spooky, beautiful ambient patches to cover my long delay/landscape tones. It covers all of the standard reverbs (Hall, Room, Plate and Spring) as well as cool effects like delay, tremolo, reverse and modulation. Like all Eventide pedals every patch gives you an amazing amount of shape control making this pedal easily the most versatile one I've ever owned. Some of the coolest sounds are Shimmer (octave) and Blackhole. This guy made a pretty great video demoing his top 10 presets. It comes with 100 by the way! Rad! Also, next to the Space is an auxiliary switch made by Loop Master that I've set to toggle through my presets so that I can jump patches faster.


I've also got some brand new stuff happening in the dirt department. The Timmy pedal is a classic boutique low to mid-gain overdrive made by Paul Cohrane. It is the warmest, richest overdrive pedal I've ever owned. I formerly used both a Fulltone Full Drive II as well as a Maxon OD808 and this thing smokes them both, easily. In addition to volume and gain knobs you also get a bass and treble knob as well as a comp cut switch that provides a lot of tonal shaping. It's super saturated and sparkly and doesn't suck any of my clean tone out. Super badass!

Next to the Timmy is a JHS Angry Charlie Channel Drive distortion pedal. I've also gotten an artist endorsement with JHS pedals, a boutique pedal company based out of Missouri. The Angry Charlie is a wonderful high gain "brown sound" distortion meant to simulate El84 tones and Marshall gains like the JCM 800. I use this for all of my high gain tones and with the Timmy on in front of it I have a lot of super cool tone shaping options. I had a ProCo RAT before this and I'm never going back. Other badass JHS pedals to look for are the Mini Foot Fuzz and the Warble Univibe, both of which will be on my board soon. JHS also does some really unique mods on long revered pedals. For example, I had the folks at JHS take my Ernie Ball VPJR and replace the output/tuner out with a buffered splitter. This cleans up the long known noise issues with the pedal as well as gives you a buffered signal throughout your chain. In my opinion these dudes smoke Keeley in the modification department.


On the top right underneath the board I've mounted a Loop Master Pedalpatch so that I can have easy access for my guitar and amp. It's a super affordable way to clean up your routing.


Here you can see how the pedal patch works beneath the board as well as get a view of my JHS Little Black Buffer pedal also mounted beneath the board. In addition to the buffered splitter I've had installed into my Ernie Ball Volume pedal this bad boy buffers my original signal from my guitar all the way to my amplifier. It doesn't matter how nice your pedals or cables are. If you're running pedalboards with patch cables then you are losing tone. This little guys solves that problem.


As you can see I've tried to keep things as clean as possible beneath the board with the wiring and routing. I'm using a combination of both George L's and Lava cables. Both are solder-less and provide the freedom to wire your board any way you like rather than be constrained by positioning. I'm powering everything with the Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 which Pedaltrain makes easily mountable underneath (another reason they are super badass).

A couple extra tidbits. My Empress Tremolo (analog tremolo with tap tempo), Electro Harmonix Micro Pog (polyphonic octave generator) and Zvex SHO (clean boost) are sitting on top of home made "boosters." I went to Home Depot and made several half inch boosters out of scrap wood based on the dimensions of my pedals. This is so that the pedals that sit on the back of the board are easily accessible without accidentally hitting knobs on the lower pedals. I covered them with black gaff tape and velcroed them to my board just like a pedal. Wala, a handy solution!

Okay, enough nerdy stuff for now. Questions? Ask em!

In Reason,

Clint Wells

5 comments:

isbelle said...

NERD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

<3

melodyb said...

I didn't know you were bi-lingual :-) I wish I understood most of that. But, in the good news department, you understand it and whatever you're doing sounds fantastic. So, carry on!!

Anonymous said...

How did you boost the "super hard on" pedal. I was thinking of doing the same thing to boost my boss Tu-2 above my ernie ball volume to save some room on the rest of the board.

Clint Wells said...

I went to Home Depot and got some 1/2 inch plywood. covered it with black tape. I made boosters for all of my pedals in case I want to change things in the future. In total they all cost me less than $1.

Best Pedal Board Case said...

This blog is fantastic; what you show us is very interesting and is really good written. It’s just great!!