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What’s up dudes!? I’ve been screwing around with a pedalboard build and figured I’d share. I’ve had a mono board and a separate stereo insert board for a while and I decided to merge them. Mainly just to give me something to dick around building, and also to try once to do a big board. Anyways, I’m nearing the homestretch after a few revisions…
I spent way too long pondering which board to use and just ended up going with a Temple Audio Trio 28 for the convenience of their module system. I have the IEC module and two four jack patchbays on it. The build is pretty solid on it. (Though the mounting screws on the module bays are a little janky and a pain in the ass tho) The IEC module is sweet since it has a built in on/off switch so you don’t have to use an external dongle or power strip. I really dig that the holes in the board are designed to fit the Cioks bricks, so I have those mounted cleanly underneath with some of their hex spacers. I dropped a Fix hinged mag-latch bridge on top to get some extra real estate. It’s lined up for the Temple hole spacing too, which I think is another cool bonus for Temple, everyone offers something that works in their system.
For the mono wiring I used the Evidence SLS solderless wires and plugs. I had to butcher a couple before figuring it out, but it’s fairly easy to get comfortable and reasonably fast making the cables. For the stereo stuff I just piecemealed a bunch of premade shit. At some point I need to clean that up to be a little sleeker and low profile, but TRS and TRS to dual mono shit is a little more tricky to do cleanly DIY, and we’ve got lives to live.
I ended up pairing my QM with an Atom. I had the Quartermaster rigged up for the mono stuff before I decided to build this board. It’s really killer. I gave some thought to replacing it with a full G3 setup here, but ultimately landed on keeping the QM and mixing it in with an Atom. The G3 is a big mofo and would eat up too much pedal space, and the mono section I largely wouldn’t reorder or need midi, so I opted for the “smaller” Atom. Especially considering with the G3 you have to use multiple loops paired to get a stereo loop, whereas the Atom does stereo TRS on every loop. What’s cool about keeping the QM in the mix is that it can largely function as a “simple” pedalboard for all the times I don’t want to go into micro-management-preset mode. I can just free-form stomp in loops in to the front of my amps. Then when I want to go full moron I engage all the stereo pedal presets with the Atom. The Atom is super cool. I’m pretty impressed so far. Great build quality and it’s relatively easy to program and reorder loops, which is really a must for all the multi-function pedals. The only thing that sucks is the editor. They have all sorts of Bluetooth apps (Yay) but none of them let you build presets. (Boo) You can do preset names, backups, updates and midi assignments but zero patch build. Hopefully that’s on the roadmap.
As for pedals I wanted to make sure I had the core circuits on the board and ultimately about 75% of the board just filled itself. I left extra room to experiment and demo some stuff I had never played before.
Of the new shit that survived the gauntlet:
Shallow Water
All the scarf wearers rave about this thing, so it was the first pedal I decided to try. Initially I turned it on and thought it was broken. Nice. A mixture of, what is it even doing, to what a bizarre noisy mess! Awesome. I was about to initiate a return, my first impression was so bad, but I decided to give it another go the next day, really focusing in on all the controls and their interactions. Mysteries solved and toanz revealed eventually. What does it do? Badassery.
Sort of chorus for those that don’t like chorus. Sort of Vibrato for those that don’t like vibrato. Sort of lofi, but subtle. If you don’t crank the mix or LFG control youre left with a Gentleman’s Modulation Pedal of Subtle IntrigueTM Half the time I don’t even realize I have it on. “Let’s get some Shallow Water action going baby” … look down… see it’s on… Hmm… turn it off… RIP to the toanz now lost. Turn it back on!!! Simple, never turn it off. Ever. I’m totally in the Fanny Pack club with this pedal. You can pry this joker from my dead ass.
Mood
WTF. Ive mercilessly ridiculed Chase Bliss for their A.D.D random noise generators throughout the years, but my local shop had a used v1 that I tried. Why lord, why? I was kind of blown away by how functional the pedal actually is. You can totally ignore the micro looper and just use the wet side for really badass multi tap delays and sweet reverbz. I went home and ordered the v2.
I now use my fanny pack to hold my extra scarves.
I dug in on the micro looper once it landed, and tbh I still don’t entirely know what it’s doing and this thing can produce tones that youll never be able to find again, BUT you must unlock the cheat code:
Overdubs off
Latching on
The micro looper then becomes this awesome pad of ambience following you around. Is the pad a smeared delay, a rhythmic reverb, a loop, who the fuck knows, but it’s really cool and really unique. Stay on the wet deck, then drop the micro loop on when you want to float. Nice.
New found respect for Chase Bliss. They are tapped in to some cool shit, but they really need to stop giving their pedals out to people obsessed with bird chirps, because this pedal can actually do really cool “normal” tones, but with a dose of unique character mixed in.
So, I started looking at other CB pedals that I could envision beyond the Bird Chirp YouTube Demos
Thermae
Gawd damn. What a mf’ing delay. Dark and broody with awesome modulation. The repeats sit so smooth. The base delay is just remarkably well done. Sequencer side of the house…. hmm… haven’t figured that shit out yet. That definitely leans into blues barista territory, but I have stumbled into a setting where you dime both intervals and the glide control to get a really quirky chorus/vibrato thing going on, which can be cool to bring in as a momentary hold function. But the base analog delay…
Being 2 for 2 with CB I have naturally preordered the Lost + Found. lol That looks dope AF, and it not being overly Glitch Fest focused is great, because my limited experience with them is that you can kind of sleep on them for “normal” core effects. Or at least I did.
Echo 600
As a DMM freak I had to try this variant. PastFX is awesome and this does exactly what you expect.
Cloudburst
Took a chance on this joker and it is such a fun pedal. Ensemble mode just immediately makes you smile. This is the first pedal I turn on if I just want to play, but don’t really have anything in mind. 20 minutes later you snap out of it and realize you’ve been zoned out in the ensemble swell. It’s cool because you can use the tone control to make it sound like a brass or string ensemble. The base Cloud verb is almost like a bonus. I turn to it for my FAS Stratocumulus vibes. The more I use it though, the more practical it becomes. It’s actually a pretty useful always-on space filler if you turn the decay and mix down. Just a really fun pedal.
Light Pedal
Total dice throw. I wanted to add a real spring reverb pedal since I have all the other reverb variants covered elsewhere. I landed on this since the SurfyBear stuff wouldn’t fit with the real estate I had open. Base spring reverb sounds good. All the clank and jangle. I throw on some trem with it and it’s full on burning man acid trip vibes. The sweep mode is really cool too, to get some extra movement. I don’t know if I can get high enough to use some of the more esoteric modes, but soon? I’m only scratching the surface with it, but I think it will survive the gauntlet.
Anyways, thats as far as I’ve gotten with the build. I have a disaster area midi box I need to mount and wire up this weekend. Once I can midi control my H90 presets with the other pedals I’ll be cooking with fire. I also need to wire in my expression pedal too, but I’m kicking around the idea of mixing in a Whammy too, so I might “need” to get a small flat board to mount them both up next to this.
I spent way too long pondering which board to use and just ended up going with a Temple Audio Trio 28 for the convenience of their module system. I have the IEC module and two four jack patchbays on it. The build is pretty solid on it. (Though the mounting screws on the module bays are a little janky and a pain in the ass tho) The IEC module is sweet since it has a built in on/off switch so you don’t have to use an external dongle or power strip. I really dig that the holes in the board are designed to fit the Cioks bricks, so I have those mounted cleanly underneath with some of their hex spacers. I dropped a Fix hinged mag-latch bridge on top to get some extra real estate. It’s lined up for the Temple hole spacing too, which I think is another cool bonus for Temple, everyone offers something that works in their system.
For the mono wiring I used the Evidence SLS solderless wires and plugs. I had to butcher a couple before figuring it out, but it’s fairly easy to get comfortable and reasonably fast making the cables. For the stereo stuff I just piecemealed a bunch of premade shit. At some point I need to clean that up to be a little sleeker and low profile, but TRS and TRS to dual mono shit is a little more tricky to do cleanly DIY, and we’ve got lives to live.
I ended up pairing my QM with an Atom. I had the Quartermaster rigged up for the mono stuff before I decided to build this board. It’s really killer. I gave some thought to replacing it with a full G3 setup here, but ultimately landed on keeping the QM and mixing it in with an Atom. The G3 is a big mofo and would eat up too much pedal space, and the mono section I largely wouldn’t reorder or need midi, so I opted for the “smaller” Atom. Especially considering with the G3 you have to use multiple loops paired to get a stereo loop, whereas the Atom does stereo TRS on every loop. What’s cool about keeping the QM in the mix is that it can largely function as a “simple” pedalboard for all the times I don’t want to go into micro-management-preset mode. I can just free-form stomp in loops in to the front of my amps. Then when I want to go full moron I engage all the stereo pedal presets with the Atom. The Atom is super cool. I’m pretty impressed so far. Great build quality and it’s relatively easy to program and reorder loops, which is really a must for all the multi-function pedals. The only thing that sucks is the editor. They have all sorts of Bluetooth apps (Yay) but none of them let you build presets. (Boo) You can do preset names, backups, updates and midi assignments but zero patch build. Hopefully that’s on the roadmap.
As for pedals I wanted to make sure I had the core circuits on the board and ultimately about 75% of the board just filled itself. I left extra room to experiment and demo some stuff I had never played before.
Of the new shit that survived the gauntlet:
Shallow Water
All the scarf wearers rave about this thing, so it was the first pedal I decided to try. Initially I turned it on and thought it was broken. Nice. A mixture of, what is it even doing, to what a bizarre noisy mess! Awesome. I was about to initiate a return, my first impression was so bad, but I decided to give it another go the next day, really focusing in on all the controls and their interactions. Mysteries solved and toanz revealed eventually. What does it do? Badassery.
Sort of chorus for those that don’t like chorus. Sort of Vibrato for those that don’t like vibrato. Sort of lofi, but subtle. If you don’t crank the mix or LFG control youre left with a Gentleman’s Modulation Pedal of Subtle IntrigueTM Half the time I don’t even realize I have it on. “Let’s get some Shallow Water action going baby” … look down… see it’s on… Hmm… turn it off… RIP to the toanz now lost. Turn it back on!!! Simple, never turn it off. Ever. I’m totally in the Fanny Pack club with this pedal. You can pry this joker from my dead ass.Mood
WTF. Ive mercilessly ridiculed Chase Bliss for their A.D.D random noise generators throughout the years, but my local shop had a used v1 that I tried. Why lord, why? I was kind of blown away by how functional the pedal actually is. You can totally ignore the micro looper and just use the wet side for really badass multi tap delays and sweet reverbz. I went home and ordered the v2.
I now use my fanny pack to hold my extra scarves.
I dug in on the micro looper once it landed, and tbh I still don’t entirely know what it’s doing and this thing can produce tones that youll never be able to find again, BUT you must unlock the cheat code:
Overdubs off
Latching on
The micro looper then becomes this awesome pad of ambience following you around. Is the pad a smeared delay, a rhythmic reverb, a loop, who the fuck knows, but it’s really cool and really unique. Stay on the wet deck, then drop the micro loop on when you want to float. Nice.
New found respect for Chase Bliss. They are tapped in to some cool shit, but they really need to stop giving their pedals out to people obsessed with bird chirps, because this pedal can actually do really cool “normal” tones, but with a dose of unique character mixed in.
So, I started looking at other CB pedals that I could envision beyond the Bird Chirp YouTube Demos
Thermae
Gawd damn. What a mf’ing delay. Dark and broody with awesome modulation. The repeats sit so smooth. The base delay is just remarkably well done. Sequencer side of the house…. hmm… haven’t figured that shit out yet. That definitely leans into blues barista territory, but I have stumbled into a setting where you dime both intervals and the glide control to get a really quirky chorus/vibrato thing going on, which can be cool to bring in as a momentary hold function. But the base analog delay…
Being 2 for 2 with CB I have naturally preordered the Lost + Found. lol That looks dope AF, and it not being overly Glitch Fest focused is great, because my limited experience with them is that you can kind of sleep on them for “normal” core effects. Or at least I did.
Echo 600
As a DMM freak I had to try this variant. PastFX is awesome and this does exactly what you expect.
Cloudburst
Took a chance on this joker and it is such a fun pedal. Ensemble mode just immediately makes you smile. This is the first pedal I turn on if I just want to play, but don’t really have anything in mind. 20 minutes later you snap out of it and realize you’ve been zoned out in the ensemble swell. It’s cool because you can use the tone control to make it sound like a brass or string ensemble. The base Cloud verb is almost like a bonus. I turn to it for my FAS Stratocumulus vibes. The more I use it though, the more practical it becomes. It’s actually a pretty useful always-on space filler if you turn the decay and mix down. Just a really fun pedal.
Light Pedal
Total dice throw. I wanted to add a real spring reverb pedal since I have all the other reverb variants covered elsewhere. I landed on this since the SurfyBear stuff wouldn’t fit with the real estate I had open. Base spring reverb sounds good. All the clank and jangle. I throw on some trem with it and it’s full on burning man acid trip vibes. The sweep mode is really cool too, to get some extra movement. I don’t know if I can get high enough to use some of the more esoteric modes, but soon? I’m only scratching the surface with it, but I think it will survive the gauntlet.
Anyways, thats as far as I’ve gotten with the build. I have a disaster area midi box I need to mount and wire up this weekend. Once I can midi control my H90 presets with the other pedals I’ll be cooking with fire. I also need to wire in my expression pedal too, but I’m kicking around the idea of mixing in a Whammy too, so I might “need” to get a small flat board to mount them both up next to this.
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