Pedal Line Friday – 8/2 – Piotr Zarek

Today’s pedal line is from Piotr Zarek. 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 Guys,

I’ve just polished my pedalboard, so I decided to send a photo to you and brag about it a bit. 🙂

My goal is to combine tone of the vintage gear (stompboxes, tube amp) & electronic experiments (VST plugins, guitar synths, guitar signal to MIDI etc).

Here’s the overall routing:

Strat -> Analogman Sun Face NKT 275 -> WOBO Custom Mixer (splitting signal):

a) Morley Mini Volume/Wah -> ZVex Super Hard On -> EHX Deluxe Electric Mistress -> Rockett Pedals Josh Smith Dual Trem -> Eventide Time Factor -> MG Custom Amp (12AX7WA, EL84)

b) BYOC Large Beaver -> RME Babyface (laptop interface, VST plugins etc.) -> EHX Hog -> RME Babyface -> (stereo signal to console -> speakers)

c) T.C.Electronic Poly Tune

Sun Face fuzz is first in line, cause it doesn’t work well anywhere else. Next goes a custom mixer used to split the signal.

The a) section goes into the guitar amp and provides “standard” electric guitar sound with classic fuzz (Sun Face), wah wah, some modulation for warmth (flanger, tremolo) & delay for rhythm variation. It goes into the VOX-like amp. ZVEX Super Hard On sounds great combined with the “british” warmth.

The b) section is here for a bit of synth, stereo, ambient & overall madness 🙂 Sound goes through muff (Large Beaver) to create long sustained notes. No VST is able to reproduce the muff sound IMO. Then it enters audio interface (Babyface) connected to a laptop. I’m here able to release my imagination and do any kind of crazy stuff with the sound (turn audio into MIDI and trigger synths, make loops, apply additional stereo effects etc). There’s a HOG2 in the interface’s “effects loop” and I often use it to make synth-like octave bendings, add harmonics, sustain a note or glide. The sound goes through an amp simulator (I like Softube Vintage Amp Room most) and goes into the console & stereo speakers.

The c) section can be turned on with a switch. This section consists of a tuner only.

The ambient section (b) is controlled by the SoftStep controller & an expression pedal.

Best,
guitatronik
http://guitatronik.com/