My view from my own little amp-town Friday afternoon. Running the '65 PRRI as the wet amp, and the Marshall Origin 20C as the dry amp. Sounded glorious. I tried to use my looper to split the signal and run both the PRRI
and the Marshall as wet amps and my Delta Blues as the dry, but my looper has completely separate signal paths, i.e. left/mono input goes ONLY to left/mono output, right input ONLY to right output. I don't have any stereo pedals, so if I want to have the option to do wet-dry-wet, then I'll need another splitter. For the money, I don't know if it's worth it (I'd get another Lehle P-Split), but we will see.
Another shot of the amps. The Ampeg B15 is creeping on the right.
New signal: [Guitar] > tuner > Greer Amps Lamplighter > EQD Afterneath > EQD Grand Orbiter > CB Naga Viper > BOSS LS-2 (IdiotBox Power Drive > Magnetic Effects Lonely Robot > EQD Westwood > EQD The Dunes) > EQD Hummingbird > Caroline Parabola > Lehle P-Split (isolated output to [Marshall Origin 20C]) > BOSS LS-2 (CB Echorec > Caroline Kilobyte > EQD Space Spiral) > Caroline Meteore > EHX 720 Looper > [Fender '65 PRRI]. (Not shown: Lehle mono volume pedal between Caroline Parabola and Lehle P-Split, and BOSS OC-5 which hasn't released yet.)
The big change here is the re-addition of my EQD Hummingbird. I was wondering the other day if the Parabola could do speeds fast enough to be almost ring modulation like the Hummingbird can. It can't, at least without the Havoc switch. When I bought the Parabola, I was so impressed that it actually kicked the Hummingbird off my board, which was my favorite pedal up to that point. The Parabola is a REALLY good tremolo, and I love that it can do frequency modulation in addition to amplitude modulation. I didn't want to take the Parabola off my board to put the Hummingbird back, but after realizing that the EHX Pitch Fork Plus wasn't gonna work for me, I thought it would be cool to have the ring modulation sound. Then I remembered how much I LOVED the sound of the Twin Stags tremolo from Dwarfcraft, and wondered if I could get 2 separate tremolos to do that sound. The two together was amazing. I love the idea of having "dueling" tremolos running them at different speeds in series, having 2 tremolos preset at different speeds used separately, one that can do frequency modulation, the other that can do the ring modulation thing, and one that can do momentary stuff (Hummingbird with the Flexi-switching). I don't know why I never thought about having both on my board, but that's a permanent thing from now on. Tremolo is my favorite effect.
The other thing I might mess with is the order of my delays. I usually have my Echorec set for short delays (more staccato stuff, and usually in one of the multi-head modes), my Kilobyte for longer stuff, and the Space Spiral for longer stuff with the modulation engaged. I've been using my Kilobyte for double-tracking short delays, which has been a lot of fun, and I realized that using the Kilobyte for shorter more often than the Echorec is a good idea. I was listening to some demos and tip-and-tricks videos while organizing the upstairs bathroom, and one of the channels I watch quite a bit is Stefan's
The Pedal Zone. I started listening to his
Tonal Teamwork: Three easy steps to improve your ambient guitar tone video because I absolutely love the sound of ambient guitar, and Stefan's ambient tone is one of my favorites. Seeing how he does his delays/reverbs, I wonder if changing the order might be interesting. I'm thinking: EQD Space Spiral > Caroline Kilobyte > CB Echorec. I want to try that out and see what happens.
Good things are happening in the music area of my basement