ilovefuzz.com

I mean, it's metal, so a lot of the time I'm using the Elements and nothing else. But the board grew out of the fact that we wanted to get into some more textural stuff (the guy who started the band was bigtime into Dream Theater and wanted keyboards but we couldn't find a keyboardist so I started getting into weirder sounds. Thankfully he left the band and we've never played DT style prog crap, but the textural idea remained). And ILF has influenced it a lot - not just in terms of what gear I use, but also in what I listen to, so a lot of the textural stuff that I play has a gaze/indie influence that is directly from the music thread here, or from boards that I've seen in this thread and I'll arrange some stuff and try it out just to see what has got you guys jazzed. The RRR pre-dirt is one off the top of my head that is a total ILF-ism. But now it is a fairly standard sound that I'll use. But I guess the basic premise of our sound is rhythmic/polyrhythmic riffs, which I will either join in on with the Elements, or I'll do something totally different, which is where the pedals come into play. Sometimes the "different" sounds that I'll do are more background stuff, for example keeping the riff the same, but indicating the chord changes with the bass and with my guitar, and sometimes the effecty stuff is the focal point and the other guitarist will riff along to keep a certain feel, but it's pushed into the background. The other guitarist does Les Paul>JCM800 with a delay for solos and chorus/flanger for clean bits, so he has a really traditional sound. I think the combination works pretty well. If nothing else it's pretty good fun

Our band is like fucking spinal tap. Since we started in 2006 we've had 6 guitarists, 7 bassists and our drummer (who cofounded the band) has just left. It's been a bit depressing - every time we get the ball rolling, get a few shows, book some studio time, someone leaves the band and we have to start the whole thing again. Because of the way the music is, we need two guitarists - I can't sing and play half the riffs we do at the same time, so we haven't been able to just keep slogging it out when the guitarists have left. And we've played a few gigs without a bassist, but everything sounds shit without a bassist. And we don't play a lot of riffs where the bass and the guitars do the same thing, so splitting the signal and running a micropog or something to a bass cab doesn't work. We did one gig like that but it was even worse than the gigs without a bassist. But anyways, we have a new bassist and are jamming with a drummer on Sunday so fingers crossed.

Everything is controlled by the Looper, so I’ll follow that. The signal path flows left to right in the looper.

1st switch: Master bypass. Good for debugging things, and bypassing the whole freaking thing in the event of catastrophic failure.

2nd switch: Kill switch. All of Road Rage’s encolsures are predrilled and we had a switch over, so yeah. In hindsight I should have made it a feedback loop and had the whole board feedback on itself. I will eventually mod it to do this.

3rd Switch: Tuner. Having it in its own loop is good as I don’t have to turn off anything to get a clean signal to tune.

4th Switch is an A/B switch. It selects the “synth loop” and the “pre-disortion loop”. In the days before I had the Elements I always ran an MXR EQ before my distortion and one after, so this was designed with that in mind. The Elements made tye pre-distortion loop pretty much redundant, so I’ve now got a green ringer in there (no knobber, second row, 1st from the right). Which is cool, because I don’t like it clean and I don’t like it post distortion, so that works well. It’s getting replaced by a custom that Turnipfarm is building with a fixed wah and a green ringer, which is going to be awesome.

Synth loop goes Frazz Dazzler>Ct5>Empress Trem>Henretta Orange Whip—Green Zapper>Copilot Mantis ii>Subdecay Noisebox>Randy>Xerograph>Dr Sci RRR

Next switch turns the fuzz on or off, and also engages the post-distortion loop, which used to contain an MXR EQ, but now is the Penny Pedals Radio Deluxe.

The actual fuzz section consists of two loops arranged in A/B and they are controlled by the next switch. Loop B is my main distortion - the Elements. Loop A is overdrive and fuzz. Velcrobot does mammoth wall of fuzz in normal mode, and then honky saxophone zippy noises in bot mode (good for solos). And the ID is set up to get into similar crackly territory to the Fuck OD, but it kinda crackles through the whole decay of the note, rather than envelope controlled. And you can stack either of the velcrobot sounds into the ID for more crackly fun.

Next is the mod loop - Cosmi (zombies - set for cheesy fusion chorus)Hummingbird>Revolver ii>Cosm (astro - 100% wet for pitch vibrato fun)>BitQuest - usually the flanger or the sample rate reducer

Last is the time loop which is routed super weird. Meet Maude>No Memory>DD-7. Meet Maude is my main delay, DD7 for looping, reverse delay and clean delays, and No Memory for long filthy delays. My No Memory misbehaves a fair bit - sometimes the delay time changes radically when I engage it (it will randomly add a second or two to the delay time indicated by the knob position) and sometimes it just won’t do anything. It sounds super awesome though, but I don’t think I can gig with it with any confidence, so I’ll either replace it with whatever delay Brian cooks up, or the Caroline Kilobyte. I just really like the sound of an overextended PT delay.

Live I just select what pedals I need for a given song before we start (or while playing the first riff) and then mostly control everything with the looper. It allows me to do some pretty complicated changes with at the most two or three taps, all of which are within a few centimetres of each other. The nice thing is that switching is mechanical, so if anything breaks down I can just bypass it and resolder it later. It would likely be a bit easier to do this with midi switching, but that just seems like a can of worms.