Pedal Line Friday – 11/27 – Steve Thompson

Today’s pedal line is from Steve Thompson. If you have a pedal line (doesn’t have to be in a board) for your rig, please email me a photo, bio, description of pedals and routing to pedalline@nulleffectsbay.com . Every Friday I’ll showcase a pedal line submission. Make sure you include any links to your band or music page.

I think this is a great idea for a new feature! Below I listed the pedals on my “board” and a bit about how I use each. I don’t really discuss the order of the line, but I think the order makes logical sense.

– BOSS TU-2 Chromatic Tuner – I’m using the output which mutes the signal when the pedal is switch on.
– Behringer EQ700 Graphic Equalizer – The first pedal in the line that messes with the signal. I was looking for a cheap EQ to use on really only one song. As you can see from the picture, I use a dramatic “inverted scoop” sort of setting. It yields a fairly strange, almost synthesizer-esque sound. I’ll probably end up replacing this with an EHX Micro Synth in the not too distant future.
– Crybaby 535Q Chrome – Nothing too special; the classic crybaby wah with “Q” depth control.
– BOSS BD-2 Blues Driver – I guess this pedal is classified as distortion, but it’s kind of a weird mixture of overdrive and distortion (with a bit of fuzziness thrown in). I can get a pretty decent vintage sort of crunch out of it.
– DigiTech Bad Monkey Tube Overdrive – I’ve actually used this pedal a lot more than I ever thought I was. I have the gain and low knobs set fairly high to get a muddy low-end-driven overdrive.
– Danelectro DD-1 Fab Tone Distortion – Old 90’s make of this pedal. I can’t say I ever paid much attention to Danelectro products, but my bassist had this and didn’t really use it, so I incorporated it into my pedal board. This thing is definitely built like a tank and while it’s nothing special, I use it to get some out of control heavier tones.
– Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Digital Reverb – Out of the three settings on this reverb (spring, hall, and “flerb”), I use hall most of the time and love it.
– MXR Carbon Copy Delay – Everywhere I turn today, people seem to love this pedal. I’m no different. Most often, I have all three knobs (Regen, Mix, and Delay) set at 12 o’ clock with the modulation switch turned on. On a few studio tracks and pretty frequently live, I’ll run feedback into the pedal and tweak the regen and delay in real-time to create a controlled sort-of white noise.

In the past I used a BOSS DS-1 and an Electro-Harmonix Nano-Clone. They fell out of favor just based on lack of use and eventually got booted from the board.

My site is http://www.stevethompson.net/. I’ve been finishing up a new album that should be available before the end of the year and had an electronica-tinged album called Score come out this past May. I live south of Pittsburgh, PA with my wife and our micro-zoo of animals. I play shows locally with a fantastic backing band consisting of Stephen Peck (Ex-ZAO) on drums, Dave Trinh (Ex-States of Melba) on saxophone, and Tony Regola on bass.