Not pictured: Boss expression pedal, Digitech 3-button footswitch (for looping control), Eventide PowerMax + ac splitter for the MXR Flanger.
Pedalboard real estate: 3 square inches to dirt, the rest to mods/delays/reverbs. Seems right to me.
I’ve gotten a little too far into the deep end with multiple pedals doing multiple things (and the ensuing infinite possibilities). I've found myself hovering near the line of choice paralysis for sounds, but have (usually) made it back okay.
Much of what I'm doing with the first H9 can be handled by the H90, once I get my head around more of the switching (hotswitching) configurations.
The joy of MIDI is that once you set up some effects (/patches/presets/whatever) it's really easy to recall everything with just a click, even on multiple pedals. I may switch back to a Morningstar MC6 for MIDI control, however, since it is way more flexible than the pretty utilitarian (and sometimes elegant) DMC micro.
Worth noting: I've had the hardest time getting MIDI messages to work after going through the Eventide H9/H90 pedals.
Apologies: I have to address the slight rotational shifts as the velcro always seems to settle funny.
Edited to add:
Other random notes:
The MXR flanger is in the LS-2 loop.
The DC-2w and 1 H9 are stereo in the loop of the H90, which can change the order of the effect loop in regard to the two onboard “presets”. The H9 + H90 essentially function like three blocks of Eventide effects that can be moved in any order: H90A H90B H9; H90A H9 H90B; H9 H90A H90A; (+ other parallel options I haven’t explored). (The other H9 is a few pedals upstream.)
The H9 has a slight drop out when switching between effects, while the H90 spills the effects, over albeit with a slight lag in switching at times. So if I’m changing some effects mid-song, I’ve set it up so that the H9 (in the loop) handles the constant effects like delays, with the H90 changing the other stuff (chorus + reverb to chorus + ultra tap delay/verb/smear thing, for example).
(Long MIDI controller ramble)
The is a side effect of using the Disaster Area controller rather than the Morningstar. The Morningstar buttons can be programmed to send up to 16 different commands per press, while the DA DMC has a different philosophy: limited options but they’re easy to set up and you don’t have to program everything from scratch.
The DA DMC sends 1) PC messages to all pedals when you change presets, 2) you can click through to increase/decrease a PC on a single pedal but that takes a series of holds to get to the right screen, or 3) you can set up two “utility” screens of three custom messages (although with limited options), but that also takes a series of hold button presses to get there.
There’s a huge change of user error in the last two options (e.g., miss the right screen by pressing + holding one too many times, accidentally just press instead of holding and switch something earlier, etc.) so I use the DA DMC micro almost exclusively for switching to the effects before a song and then change stuff on the H90 itself mid-song, as needed. This avoids sending program change messages to both H9s (even a message of “change to the same exact effect” will make them slightly). As I write this all out, I see some other ways of working around this but still involves long presses and cycling through screens, and everything gets into the weeds really quickly.
The little Disaster Area DMC micro.pro controller (or other DA stuff) is great for starting out with MIDI and can do a number of things. It really is plug and play. But there are limited tools and options.
The Morningstar stuff can do pretty much anything, but be prepared to spend some time troubleshooting why it’s doing the wrong thing or why it’s not doing anything, etc. (It sometime reminds me of when I worked with some computational linguists, and they’d just come up with some script in Python while I’d just stare blankly. Not that complicated, of course, but it does take work. It’d be pretty easy to make the Morningstar function just like the DA, with a “starter kit” template, but I think their intention is to force people to learn the basics of programming it, which, to be clear, isn’t that difficult it just takes work. Both units have computer (web) editors.