Pedal Line Friday – 8/30 – Kevin Messerschmidt

Today’s pedal line is from Kevin Messerschmidt. 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.

Kevin Messerschmidt – been playing about 30 years. This is my recent setup.

I normally use my setup just for worship times, and not in a traditional church settings so I can go quite outside the box. I do have a Fernandes Sustainer guitar but rarely use it. Fripp was a big influence, and I had this with a Roland VG8 but didn’t really need it anymore with this setup. Shoegazer is another huge influence, hence Slowdive’s FX500 with Soft Focus preset. I don’t use any distortion but I’m building a compressor/Rat box as a hobby. Next pedal will be a DD20 delay.

I’ve got three different stereo chains: “dry”, “wet”, and “synth”.

STUFF:

Yamaha Acoustic with GK2A pickup

Fernandes Sustainer electric

BBE Supacharger power supply (MOD:  created outputs for 12v-200mA for FX500, and 9vac for minimixer to get rid of all my wallwarts!)

Midiman 6-channel minimixer (awesome tiny device!)

Morley PVO volume pedal (MOD: added an extra pre-fade ouput for dry effects chain, and added small momentary switch to change presets on FX500)

Roland GI-10 guitar-midi converter (MOD: added a guitar output jack because these earlier versions didn’t have one)

Yamaha FX500

Behringer FCV100 stereo volume pedal

Jamman Solo looper

Line 6 Verbzilla

Digitech XMC MultiChorus

Laptop running Reaper with VST’s for synth/strings/etc

Homemade sustain box for GI-10 (Gi-10 doesn’t sustain synth notes with regular guitar over it. Mark at marksmart.net devised & helped with this).

START: GK cable from acoustic guitar thru custom sustain box into Roland GI-10. Guitar output goes into the morley pedal to drive dry/wet chains.

Dry chain:  Jamman Solo > Digitech X-chorus > Verbzilla reverb > minimixer 1/2. I generally set the chorus and forget it. I like it lush. Subtle stereo shimmer Reverb sounds great with acoustic picking.

Wet chain:  Morley volume pedal > (sometimes Jamman here) > Yamaha FX500 > minimixer 3/4. Allows me to fade in ambience, delay, and overall lushness. Sometimes I put Jamman here when I’m doing more ambient stuff.

Synth chain:  GI-10 > cheap midi interface cable > laptop > Behringer stereo volume > minimixer 5/6. This lets me fade in string/cello/woodwind/samples/synths and anything the computer can output.

To sum it up, minimixer stereo output gives me the basic acoustic with a stereo dreamy lushness that goes into the mixer. I can fill the room with a wall of sound. Bliss.