Pedal Line Friday – 7/26 – Brent Hamker

Today’s pedal line is from Brent Hamker. 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.

Hi my name is brent hamker and i am a big fan of your website as i myself am a big pedal enthusiast.  I do a lot of gigs locally (3 or 4 weekly) and every single gig is different so i need to cover as many tones and bases as possible.  For instance Thursday night i played in a jazz quartet doing standards and john Scofield esque tunes to this sunday where i played at a church service called the U2charist,  a service comprised completely of U2’s music.  I also play in a dance/rock band in Cleveland, OH called pOUT ( facebook.com/poutband , www.poutband.com), a reggae dancehall band called The Champion Bubblers, the Ernie Krivda Jazz Workshop, as well as my own straight ahead jazz groups and who ever else will call me, So i built this pedal board to be the guitarists swiss army knife of tone.

The first Effect in my chain is the Digitech Whammy-  I mostly use it for octave up sounds on both leads and chords, when you play polyphonically you get that glitchy sound which is kinda cool.  I put it first in the chain to get as pure of a guitar signal as possible.

Boss SL-20 Slicer
This comes on and off my board quite a bit i generally just use it when im playing solo or duo gigs to support the music with some sort of groove and just loop it, some times i use as just tremolo sound, very fun to experiment with.

Mojo Hand FX Iron Bell
This pedal is beyond cool, great muff sound but more open and dynamic.  Its my go too pedal for nice smooth lead sounds ala David Gilmour

Ibanez TS9DX
this is the first pedal i ever got, i use it for low drive kinda stuff and for a solo boost in front of the DLS MKIII.  Hopefully sending it to Keeley to get the 2×4 mod soon.

Catalinbread DLS MKIII
This is my newest pedal and im super happy with it, it sounds great as close to a marshall plexi as im gonna get playing through my fender blues deluxe.  right now i have set on the Super Bassman setting and it sounds great with other drives and fuzzes, definitely reccomend!

Dunlop Crybaby from Hell
Im not a metal player but this wah is super versatile and sounds great, bottom line, and is reliable.

Line 6 DL4
i use so many different delay sounds that my board would be so crowded if i had a different pedal for each sound.  The DL4 makes it easy to have several sounds and a great looper all in one enclosure, This is the only pedal i have to have on every gig without it i feel naked.

Boss CH-1 Chorus
eh it sounds pretty good and has worked for me so far, eventually ill replace it with something better, perhaps the EQD Sea Machine, but for now it does its job.

MXR Phase 90
again just the stock pedal that has worked for me for a couple years, it sounds fine and does its job well.  Its set for a slow phase sweep and only gets clicked on every once in a while.  Again its just a place holder for now.

Effects Bay keep on keepin’ on with the cool site, its my favorite part of the day.