Greetings tone lovers. I hope the new year is a good one for all of you. I've had some major revelations in my search for killer tone that can be easily controlled.
My set up is pretty extravagant, but after all I am the Tone Ranger and will stop at nothing to achieve killer tone.
In the past, switching effects and distortion tones on-stage has been a complicated & distracting struggle. My new set up allows me to select an effect or group of effects, then blend them in or out at my leisure. This works well with chorus-echo-reverb-distortion-wah ect. Besides the effects you wish to use, the 2 main components of this set-up are a 2 channel splitter and a cross fade pedal. The splitter splits the signal into 2 paths and feeds it to your cross-fade pedal which has two inputs and one output. The two lines are identical until you kick in an effect. At this point the cross-fade pedal brings that effect in by degree as you press the pedal down. You are blending the channel with no effects on it with an identical copy of that signal that has effects on it. The transition is seamless. Here are the cross-fade pedals main advantages.
Instead of frantically trying to engage all of your effects at the right second, you select the combination you want and then fade it up or down. You can always escape back to your straight signal or leave the pedal in the middle for a more subtle and blended tone.
It's a lot more like painting than my usual method of trying to wring the sound out of my gear by the neck. This affords me the freedom to perform the music and lock in with the band instead of worrying about my tone.
Here is a diagram of this killer set up:
This is the easiest way to get the most control over the widest range of sounds, period. Its a set up similar to the ones used by black belt tone masters like Steve Morse and Robben Ford. In my case, the splitter is inside my master volume pedal.
This is not just a pedal, this is the pedal master. Not only a splitter and volume pedal, it also has an imposing pair of TS9 tube screamers and a parallel effects loop inside.
Due to its internal buffering and a gain of two, it gives me a lot more signal and a lot less noise. Did I mention I was serious about tone?
Anyway, it only takes a two channel splitter and a cross-fade pedal to blend your effects seamlessly. This is the setup for painting with sound. Nothing else I've tried comes close to giving me this kind of sonic freedom. Life is good.
I leave one of the lines clean and put effects on the other for basic wet to dry operation. You may also use different effects on both lines. This allows you to blend from reverb to delay for example or a short delay to a long one. Or maybe you'd like to fade from a mild distortion with a short delay to a crunchier distortion with chorus or wah-wah on it.
There are two problems with running a bunch of battery powered stomp boxes together in a long line. The first problem can be eliminated by building a power supply to keep the voltage consistent on all the devices.
The second problem is that most of these devices do not have true bypass switching which would allow your signal to go around the device when it's not kicked in. This lack of true bypass switching forces your signal to mingle with the guts of all your pedals, which in turn loads down your signal until it starts to degrade. Each device has an input and output impedance that must be matched if you hope to out-smart this problem. The input impedance should be at at least ten times greater than the output impedance of the prior device to avoid signal loss.
If you don't have a true bypass switch with input and output impedance control, you can still run about three effects without degrading the signal. In my setup, adding the fourth effect caused immediate and noticeable signal loss, so I just use three effects for now. I know my next step is true bypass switching with input and output impedance for each device and one power supply that feeds the whole rig. I can't think of much else I could possibly need in the way of gear.
So remember, where there is an equipment problem there is a solution and where there's a will, there's a way. I hope this has given you some ideas to work with. If so, have fun with them.
The Tone Ranger
PS. This is not the only way to achieve killer tone but it is a great
way!