Pedal Line Friday :: Brian T.

My primary gigging pedalboard.

The board itself is a Schmidt Array SA250. I was introduced to the Schmidt Array boards sometime in 2020. The world was shutdown, gigging wasn't happening, and all we could do was obsess over gear. A friend had a custom board built and I was intrigued. I now own two of them. This SA250 and a SA750, the latter of which is primarily a pedal testing/proving platform that rarely leaves my home studio. The SA250 comes with me to all my gigs as it has all my personal "I would rather not live without this" effects and tone shaping options.

Pedals are, in order of signal path:

TC Electronic Polytune - I prefer pedal based tuners over those clip-on things as the pedal tuners tend to be more accurate/reliable in my experience.

MXR Bass Synth - the most recent addition. It lives up to all the hype and it worth the price of admission for the presets alone. Want to make synth keyboard basslines happen with your bass guitar? You can totally do that. I've owned a lot of synth bass pedals over the last 30 years and this is by far and away the best at tracking notes and dialing in sounds. Want to replicate the synth bass on Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel"? You can do that. Want to "Express Yourself" with Madonna? You can totez do that as well.

3 Leaf Proton - the envelope filter that does the things you want it to do and the convenience of a usable tone knob. Envelope filters are not all equal and the Proton sets a fairly high bar for tone, tracking, and flexibility. The range of sounds you can get out of the Proton by itself is great. It also plays well with overdrive pedals which introduces another whole set of interesting sounds you can coax of out it.

Tech21 YYZ Shape Shifter - hidden below the top deck you can see a bit of the front edge (blue) of this pedal. It's buried because it fit there and it's a pedal that is either on all night or it's off all night. I can easily reach the bypass and boost buttons with my fingers to turn things on/off as-desired at the beginning of the evening. When the music calls for it, this is the pedal for creating a raging rock and roll tone. Full, rich lows and just enough drive on the high end to let people know you mean business. I own the rack mount preamp that this pedal was designed after and the pedal is actually my preferred version. It's much easier to get usable tones from the pedal. I actually own two of these in the event one of them fails. Seriously considering picking up another one just to have more redundancy. It does the thing it does too well to go back to anything else. Whether or not this pedal is on all night often depends on which bass I bring to the gig. Sometimes the gig itself dictates which instrument is the correct one to bring, sometimes it's my mood. Either way, when this is on all night, the resulting tone is somewhere between Geddy Lee and John Entwistle. It's a lot of fun.

Boss OC-2 - I own a number of octave pedals. This is the one that does the thing so very, very well. More specifically, an early 80's version of the OC-2. A friend of mine swears by them and I should have listened years ago instead of cycling through all the other ones I own. It tracks very reliably down to 3rd fret "G" on the E string of a standard tuned 4-string bass. The tone of the lower octave is exactly what you want it to be. You can find pre-1985 versions of the OC-2 online for extremely reasonable prices, especially if you don't care what it looks like. This one has clearly seen some miles. The backup that I keep "just in case" looks even worse for wear but, just like this one, still sounds incredible. It doesn't have to be pretty to sound good.

Boss CE-2B - my current go-to bass chorus is another holdout from the 1980's. My only complaint is that the LED is so dim you can't tell if it's on or off. At some point I should probably do something about that. It's a bass chorus that doesn't rob you of low end and also makes all that shimmering chorus goodness happen. The other chorus that I'll occasionally swap out for this is a TC Electronic Corona. They're different beasts entirely. The CE-2B is more subtle and smooth while the Corona is a bit more opinionated about things. Both sound great and honestly the gig and my mood will impact which I've favoring at the moment. For what it's worth the CE-2B has been sitting there for at least 6 months now.

A/DA Flanger - do you like the sound of the 70's bass flanger that's all over recordings from that era? This is how you recreate that sound without spending a ton of money on the vintage rack mount gear.

J. Rocket Airchild 660 - the most recent addition. I tried one at the NAMM show and was immediately impressed. While I don't own a Fairchild 660 compressor to A/B this with, I have to assume that this is doing a fabulous job of emulating that classic piece of gear. It sounds amazing. It's very easy to dial in usable compression settings that don't suck all the life and dynamics out of your playing. The "tone" control is the biggest reason it sits at the end of my signal chain and not elsewhere. It really lets you dial in and "clean up" the signal being sent to the amp. It's challenging to put into words exactly how great this thing is and how much you'll never want to live without it after you've tried it.

Little white tin: has picks in it, because of course it does. Sometimes you need to use a pick for that one song. Sometimes you need to use a pick all night. Sometimes you don't need a pick all night long. They're sitting there, waiting, just in case. I'm pretty sure I cut down a JHS pedals sticker to cover the goofy advertising on the little tin. I don't recall for sure where it came from.

Power is supplied by a Voodoo Lab power brick. Cables on the board are all EBS low profile so I can Tetris everything in there. All the other cables I use are Rattlesnake. From the patch cord going from the board to my amp to the short cable from my wireless transmitter to my instrument to the XLR cables for mics and everything in between.

A bit about me: I primarily play in cover bands. I did original music during the 1990's and early 2000's. It was a lot of fun but I simply don't have time or energy to devote to an original project anymore. Cover bands are a fun and easy way to just play. As mentioned above, this pedalboard is designed specifically for "the essentials" of doing covers. I play about 100 gigs a year and 95% of those gigs are with a three piece classic rock cover band. We don't have a setlist, nor do we ever rehearse. I'm never sure what exactly we're going to play any given night but this assortment of pedals does a great job at replicating various sounds from 1960's-1990's recordings.

Submit Your Pedal Line!

About a million years ago, I used to run a blog called EffectsBay. On that blog, the most popular feature I would run was Pedal Line Friday. This is where readers of the site would send pics of their pedalboard and a short (sometimes long) write-up of routing and thoughts about specific pedals and the reasoning why they liked it, etc. Readers. loved this. It was a great way to learn about new applications or techniques regarding pedals. It also brought a little inspiration and knowledge about pedals you were not familiar with. It also brought a great sense of community - people like sharing and absorbing cool things, right? It was a super popular feature, and I loved putting them together.

All you have to do is send a pic of your pedalboard (or pedal line - it doesn't have to be on a board) along with a short (or long) write-up of the board. We want a list of pedals (manufacturer/model), routing would be great, and, most importantly, why you use those particular pedals. Also, this is a great way to promote your band or musical project - include that information as well!

You can send the pic and the write-up to pedalline@rattlesnakecables.com.