It’s been a minute, so I may as well share what’s going on at the moment. Everything below is in order of signal path. Arrows on the photo help make sense of which way it’s moving. Basically a backwards “Z”.
- Snark Tuner. It tunes. It’s fine.
- JHS Pulp N Peel. V4 I believe. I don’t know why I wanted V4. It has a bunch of features I don’t care about. But it’s a really nice sounding compressor if you want a compressor that sounds like something. Transparent is overrated.
- Xotic RC Booster Scott Henderson. I think the Scott Henderson version means it’s copper and you get a little gain knob for the 2nd switch. Or maybe it just means it’s copper. I don’t use that 2nd switch much at all, but especially with lower output single coils this is great when you need to bang out some chords and have them cut through a bit. And general purpose driving other pedals harder is solid.
- Chase Bliss Gravitas. Weird placement but it’s just kinda stuck there. I run this at 18V because it’s a little wimpy otherwise. It sounds great, has a ton of features. The Harmonic mode is pretty glorious.
- Smallsound/Bigsound Mini. Might be the best sounding overdrive on the planet. Take your Klon and shove it.
- Wampler Paisley Deluxe. I use both sides at somewhat higher gain levels since my amps are really clean and my other OD pedals are low gain. You maybe noticed I love drive pedals with two band EQ so I dig that the right side offers that.
- Wampler Tumnus Deluxe. I didn’t mean to insult the Klon before. It’s a really nice sounding pedal. But it sounds better (to me) when you add more tone control options.
- Earthquaker Devices Sea Machine. V3? Whatever the newest one is with the soft touch switch. Normal chorus/vibe sounds out of this thing are totally fine, but a little underwhelming. When you add in some slapback sound and make this thing a tad wilder, it shines. Which almost makes me want a more normal chorus/vibe pedal. Ah well.
- Strymon Deco. One of the pedals that will never leave my board. Never! I use it for flanger sounds. But the tape saturation by itself as a way to thicken up clean sounds is sooooo good.
- Earthquaker Devices Avalanche Run. V2. I usually use the expression pedal to control the number of repeats, so I can gradually go in and out of oscillation madness. Shoegaze in a single box. Can’t go wrong.
- Strymon Volante. I’ve had other Strymon big box pedals (Timeline and Mobius) and while they were not super user friendly to me, I also felt silly that they did a lot of stuff I didn’t use, like there was all this untapped potential but I wasn’t dedicated enough to pull it out. This thing is the same, except easier to use. But the thing is, just using it as a simple echo is worth every penny alone. It sounds amazing!
- Earthquaker Devices Levitation. This thing can cover a good amount of ground, but I’ve kind of settled on it being the more subtle end of my reverb chain. And that’s mainly because of what’s next.
- Meris Mercury7. Oh man.
- Pure Tone Buffer. A bunch of the pedals on my board have options to run in buffered mode, but I don’t always use it. Rather than keep track of what is where, just throwing this guy at the end does a great job.
- ElectroHarmonix Dual Expression. I have it going to the repeats on the Avalanche Run and the Mix on the Mercury7.
That’s what I’m rolling with for today.