Show us your guitar setup

[steveoath]

The new EHX synth pedal sounds great in the videos. I wonder how easy it is to get the tracking accurate.

[Funch]

Here’s a thread link to a fellow vguitar forum member Integrating guitar with eurorack modular.

https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25929.0

[crim]

I’ve been enjoying this minimal setup for ambient guitar stuff lately

[manfromuncool]

That is a great setup, I used to have so much fun with the Superego and later the + model.

The Superego is a great accompaniment and it was nice being able to stick a tremolo on the pads with the +. I’ve moved on to a Gamechanger Audio Plus pedal, but miss the portamento on the Electro-Harmonix.

What are you running on the norns?

[manfromuncool]

From what I’ve heard regarding their Mel9 and Synth9 models their tracking is great, I think the Mono Synth uses similar digital technology.

I used to have an Electro-Harmonix Bass Micro Synth, an analog pedal. It sounded really great, very organic and great low end.

More recently I had the Meris Enzo, perfect tracking, and a good delay which could be used standalone, but it didn’t have the character of the Micro Synth.

From what I can gather the Micro Synth is distorting and filtering the original signal, so no issues with tracking, and may be replicable with modular.

I do enjoy Rings with guitar, using an Ears as a preamp along with it’s envelope follower or the gate to another envelope, another fun thing is using the gate to advance a sequence one step at a time as an accompaniment.

[crim]

What are you running on the norns?

Mainly MLR or a script I wrote called timeparty, which is a step sequenced delay effect (still needs some work, but it’s fun). I’d like to hookup a midi footswitch to the norns so I can be a little more hands free, and maybe modify some scripts to add a tap tempo as well.

[motorhead412]

[ThurberMingus]

I took an artsy photo during soundcheck of a show I played last night. Guitar is a DIY semi-hollow Jazzmaster, and pedals are:
Polytune > Fuck overdrive > OCD > Pitchfactor > Strymon Brigadier > DL4 > RV-6 > amp.
My amp is a Jackson Newcastle 30, it’s great but I’ve been thinking I would like more headroom and I’m not crazy about the P&W association those amps carry.

[rumorazzi]

Last iteration of my setup, used this one for the last gig:

Guitar to dirt and H9 and then to the amp’s front in.
Fx send to Drolo then all the way to the end of chain and back to the amp’s stereo return.

[WeAreTemporary]

Like many musicians, I’ve been riding the pedal renaissance pretty hard as of late (whether for synths or guitar). But given that a lot of the more complex pedals have surged enormously in price (often well in excess of $300), I’ve become more curious about rack effects from the 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s.

One pedal in particular—the Alexander Pedals Ski-Fi—had roused my interest last year. From what I could gather, it was largely based on an 80’s rack reverb algorithm—as forum rumors had it, specifically the Bloom algorithms of the Alesis Midiverb ii. I loved the Sky-Fi, but I couldn’t help but notice that this was a $200 pedal emulating a rack effect that could routinely be found used for $50-80 bucks.

Needless to say, that got me wondering about all sorts of forgotten rack units, how cheap they often were, and how they compared sonically to contemporary pedals. Since then, I’ve been on a bit of a rack bender… Alesis Midiverb ii, Ibanez DM2000, Yamaha SPX-990, Lexicon LXP-15, Roland DEP-5, various ART and DigiTech stuff…

The first two things I noticed with almost all of these units were the following:

A) pedals were definitely more conducive to spontaneous experimentation and real-time tweaking

and B) by God do a lot of those older rack units still sound phenomenal!

So I’m now happily running a hybrid system of pedals and racks (making excellent use of EHX’s new Tri Parallel Mixer pedal).

Soooo… now I’ve become deadly curious… who else has discovered / never forgotten this magic hybrid world of pedals & racks, and what rack effects are you running as part of your pedal setups? Share pics, love poems, odes to your rack effects… go!

[Ithacus]

Rack gear is great! I love the 80’s digital stuff. It’s just the shear size (and difficulty of moving it around) that puts most off I think.

I’ve got a Korg SDD1000 and Roland SDE 2000 that I use with guitar a lot.

The newest pedal I bought is the EHX Attack/Decay and it is fantastic for ‘synth’ type guitar sounds (it works really well polyphonically).

I’ll have to get a picture of my current setup.

[zebra]

lexicon vortex forever

[mattlowery]

modify some scripts to add a tap tempo as well.

Was thinking about thinking during my commute today. So many scripts that I’m using at the end of my chain would benefit from tap tempo. I’m not quite there in lua yet, but it’s on my list to learn!

[mattlowery]

This is great! How are you navigating the line level/instrument level mismatch, or is there one? I often get caught up on that when doing these kinds of thought experiments.

[WeAreTemporary]

A) A lot of racks allow you to switch input sensitivity between -20/+4, which goes a long way to address gain staging issues.

B) If the rack effect in question doesn’t have instrument level inputs, then one of the neat features of the Tri Parallel Mixer by EHX is that it allows you to set both send volume and return volume separately to address precisely the kind of level mismatches you mention.

[909one]

I sold almost all of my pedals to buy modular stuff, thinking I would process guitar with modular but I’ve had so much more fun not playing guitar that guitar has suffered greatly. I just recently bought an Empress Zoia though, and next show I play with guitar that will pretty much be the only pedal I use.

[mattlowery]

Here is my “idea rig”. Would never play a show with this unwieldy best. But hot damn, one can make some wild noises very quickly in the studio.

[DoS]

Steel bass guitar fabricated from scraps of metal; pictured shortly after being handed out to anyone willing to play it and a whole collection of home-made instruments at a festival in 2008. The guitar on the right was not mine, and was made from something like a warming pan.

[WeAreTemporary]

Such a beautifully curated sound design board. I bet you could get lost for hours and hours just gently brushing chords and soft arpeggios.

[mattlowery]

Thank you! And, yes, it’s fun to input very little by way of playing and see what comes back.