I have been planning my music setup for few months now. Plan is to have limited setup and learn it very well. I have decided which will be my main synth (Equator 2) and few Kontakt libraries I start to concentrate on. I have limited effects which I start to use and set all hardware synths to be easily accessible on Cubase. I will concentrate on Cubase even though Live’s next version looks interesting. I finally connected Revv D20 to recording setup. Since that I have tried to find out which pedals I start to use.
Original plan was to have insulated power supply and connect set of pedal I need for current sound. Haven’t found pedal board which could work well without attaching pedals to the board. So I have accepted to have pedal board with pedals attached to board. Planned to have it with power supply to 12 pedals but couldn’t figure out how to limit pedals to only 12 and have everything I want. Then I learned I could have power supply for 14 pedal with Stymon Zuma and Ojai. 14 seemed to be number of pedal in which I didn’t need to have anything important out. When I have 14 pedal pedalboard I probably find out I have no need for two of those pedals. I have redundancies in 14 pedals but I wanted all of them. I had more pedal I could have added but I can live without.
Important decision is I want to limit pedals to 14. If something new comes something has to go. Current plan is to have tuner, gate, compressor, two overdrives, distortion, two fuzzes, phaser, harmonic tremolo which can do much more, two delays and two reverbs. There will probably be changes early next year because I want to stack 3 delays and 3 reverbs. EHX Oceans 12 and Empress Echosystem are high on wish list because first can have two reverbs same time and second can do two delays same time. Both can also do pretty weird stuff. And both can do reverb delay if I ever want to stack four delays and four reverbs or make that six of both because both can do that twice. And then there is Empress Reverb which can do quite interesting things but only one thing at the time.
I might have too much on distortion side with two overdrives and fuzzes. Distortion might not be needed because other overdrive can have quite high gain sounds and I am not sure if I need more gain and fuzzes could to high gain distortion too. Compression might not be needed because I can compress with distortion pedal. If I can drop something from compression/distortion side there is room for something weird which works for ambient stuff or one of those tremolo and reverb pedals which give interesting sounds by themselves.
Photo above have eight pedals which will be on first version of pedal board. Two of those eight might be replaces early next year. I know that when I get power supply and test pedals together. Current power supply is so noisy I can’t do proper tests with many pedals back to back. At least if there is distortion involved. One reason I decided to get Strymon and not something cheaper. Strymon being able to give 14 outputs was other important reason.