Pedal Line Friday – 9/10 – Joe Bear

Today’s pedal line is from Joe Bear. 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.

For my recording studio I found I wanted to keep all my effects hooked up so that I had access to them at all times! Sounds easy, but careful thought had to go into the set-up! In order to have true by-pass, I would need a switcher that could work with 25+ pedals… That was NOT going to happen, so I needed to do some homework…

As you will notice, I have mostly Boss pedals. Before you all get bent out of shape, I wanted to tell you of a very simple philosophy… “I believe in not paying large sums of money to achieve the same tone as boutique pedals!” That being said, I have used Boss pedals as my medium and have modded the ones that are substandard. This has given me the exact sound I have been looking for my whole life! I personally don’t do the modding myself. I have Rick from http://pedalrmods.shutterfly.com/ do all my modding. Even my Crate amp has been modded for a Vox tone!

Okay lets break these pedals down and show whats happening in my set-up! If you want to know what has been done to each modded pedal, please contact Rick! He will be more then happy to work with anyone with an interest. I will start from guitar and go to the back of the amp: I start out by going into a boost/buffer that was built into an old Boss pedal. Rick named it a Lil Bear, Big Boost! (I painted it candy apple red!) From there I go down onto the floor and go through a Morley volume and a Morley wah. That way I have a buffer in front of those pedal! Then it jumps over to a Boss SL-20 slicer pedal. I then move up to the board and into the input of an NS-2 noise suppressor. (I will just give Boss model numbers from this point) In the loop of the NS-2 I start my distortion chain. First is a BBE sonic stomp, (a must have item) into a GE-7 EQ pedal (modded), into a CS-3 compressor pedal(modded) into a BD-2(modded) I then go into a OS-2 overdrive(modded) to a DS-1(triple modded) into a MD-2 mega distortion(un-modded) to an MT-2 that is also modded. All this goes into the front input of my amp!

In the effects loop of the amp, I did the following effects in this, a specific order… BUT… This is subject to some change because I have less modded pedals in this loop. I lose a lil bit of quality in some of the effects. Noticeable only during the recording process! If I was playing live, I wouldn’t change a thing!

Okay from the effects loop of the amp:
I start this loop with a TR-2 tremolo pedal. It has a few different mods to it and it also has a volume boost added. Its important to keep your signal strong through the effects loop. From there I go into an AC-2 acoustic simulator(Which is a big tone sucker, so this needs to be boosted), from there I go into a OC-3 super octave(un-modded) to a PH-3 phase shifter(un-modded) and then into a AW-3 dynamic wah pedal(un-modded). This whole row could use a lil tweeking and I plan on keeping my modder busy! From there I go into a PS-5 super shifter, which is one of the best doubler effects I have ever used!( I will never need to mod this pedal!) I then run a CH-1 super chorus(modded only because of its age.) Into a standard BF-2 flanger. I have never played through a better flange then this… If you spent more money, I think its a waste… Just my preference, I do not judge any set-up to be inferior! And my last 2 pedals are, the DD-7 digital delay, and a RV-3 digital reverb/delay combo! RV-3 has some real nice lush reverb and delay combinations in it. You can really do a lot with it. Sometimes these can be hard to find, but if you can get your Paws on one, it is well worth it. Then, back to the amp!

I love this set-up, as well as my studio!
http://bearsdenstudio.blogspot.com/

Feel free to stop by and ask me anything! I enjoy talking music. Please just don’t ask about the Minnesota Vikings… Well chow for now and keep in tune!

Joe Bear, Lil bear’s den studio