Bill, Seems you and I have gone in completely separate directions with our pedalboards. I used to play through this:
Although it has most of the effects I normally would require, it's a fairly large/heavy board and doesn't have the occasional oddball effect that I might suddenly need - envelope filter, rotary drum, pitch shifter, etc...Plus, there's a lot of wiring and all effects are screwed directly into the board, so I can't really troubleshoot anything in a timely fashion if I had a problem at rehearsal or a gig. Plus I was tired of carrying a guitar AND a big pedalboard case. The group that I've been playing with covers tunes from all over the musical map and I didn't want to have to bring along extra pedals in addition to this behemoth. So I dramatically downsized to this:
The drive pedals include an Xotic SL Drive which delivers amazing Marshall-like distortion. The other two are a Klon-clone and TubeScreamer-like pedal made by a friend of mine. I like cascading one into the other for varying levels of overdrive. The Eventide H9 has every effect imaginable (all very high quality). Problem is that you can only have one effect at a time engaged and changing between effects involves using the scroll wheel which isn't super convenient. So I changed gears completely and bought one of these ver recently to dip my foot in the digital multi-effect processor/amp modeling pool:
I know a lot of people's knee-jerk reaction to the digital units is that they all sound like overly processed and sterile pieces of crap. I was one of those people. Truth of the matter is that these things have come a LONG way since their introduction. So long as you're willing to spend the time crafting the tones you want, the results are pretty amazing. Plus, being able to construct presets for individual songs, allows a ton of flexibility which is easy to control. The amp/cab/mic modeling doesn't sound so great if you're using an amp without an effects loop (which mine don't have). So I pretty much just use it to give me unlimited stomp box options. Since I was so impressed with the POD HD500X but don't use any of the amp/cab modeling, I put in an order for one of these:
The effects quality supposedly eclipses the POD. It should be arriving early this week. They are being released in very limited numbers right now in a wait-list fashion. So if I don't find that the price tag justifies keeping it over the POD, I should be able to sell it for what I paid. Sorry for the long winded post but we get so few threads on pedalboards...and I love 'em! (Message edited by jalevinemd on July 12, 2015)
