Pedal Line Friday – 8/8 Pete Hiley

Today’s pedal line is from Pete Hiley. 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 iany links to your band or music page.

Here are my pedals, arranged on a RUFO pedalboard purchased from Vintage Gitar in Oslo, Norway. I play in a stoner-rock band called The Wit (www.thewit.no) based in Oslo. I’m playing an early 80’s Gibson ES-335TD, a ’76 Gibson Explorer (Ltd Edition) fitted with Lindy Fralin p92’s, an MJT Jazzmaster copy and a ’79 Washburn Falcon. For amplification, I’m using a Simms-Watts MKII 100 watt head into a 1984 Marshall 4×12″ bass cabinet and an old Telrad (Norwegian company) 2×12 cabinet fitted with two monster PA speakers.

For power, I’m using a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2 plus, which is hidden away under the top bank of pedals.

The signal chain is as follows:

1: Sonic Research ST-200 Tuner. Tuners are tuners, I guess, but this is certainly the quickest one I have ever used. The accuracy and response are excellent and the user-preset function is pretty useful as well. I always thought the Gibson Min-ETune thing looked like it would do away with floor tuners all together. That was until I tried one the other day.  It functioned perfectly well, and was fun to use, but it kind of reminded me of an orthopaedic shoe in the way that it looked. It completely ruins the side-profile of the headstock in my opinion, as well as adding extra weight at the wrong end. Anyway, enough about that…

2: Pete Drive PD-1 Ok, so this is really just a Boss SD-1 that I repainted and renamed. The paint job doesn’t do anything for the sound, but I think it makes it slightly nicer to look at. I love SD-1’s; they are as cheap as they are reliable. The Simms-Watts head is incredibly clean, so I’m using the SD-1 with a relatively low drive setting, just to give the sound of an amp that just on the point of breaking up. I understand that the SD-1’s are voiced on an overdriven tube amp, and it’s perfect for that.

3: Analog Man Astro Tone Fuzz I don’t use it all that much, but it has an excellent dynamic response. Changing the pick attack can really squeeze the tone. I’m running this and the King of Tone at a slightly lower voltage, using the SAG feature on the Pedal Power 2, but I’m not totally sure if it affects the tone all that much.

4: Analog Man King of Tone  I’m using channel 1 as a clean boost and channel 2 on the distortion setting. Channel 1 stays on pretty much all the time and works nicely with the SD-1. It also gives decent clarity to the Astro Tone.

5: Earthquaker Devices Arpanoid  This pedal has capabilities that I’m yet to fully explore/appreciate, and I haven’t really found a good use for it. However, if you set it as shown, you get a kind of slap-back octave situation. It’s hard to describe, but it works really well on leads patterns and gives a kind of vintage style effect. It only really stays on the board to encourage me to play with it. Otherwise, I think it might just end up on a shelf at home.

6: Analog Man ARDX20 Dual Analog Delay with the AMAZE0 Controller Pedal pictured to the right. The delay itself is amazing as it is, but the controller pedal gives you modulation options, a tap-tempo function, a bank of user-programmable presets and a choice of quarter, eighth and dotted eighth note settings. It’s just extremely cool and: No, I don’t work for Analog Man 🙂

7: Boss DD-3  I have no fixed use for this, but it’s nice to have. I’m mostly using the ‘hold’ function to create some atmospheric stuff between songs. Not much one can say about the DD-3 that people don’t already know.

8: EHX Holy Grail Nano The ‘flerb’ setting is poor, but the ‘hall’ and ‘spring’ settings are perfect. I’m using it for colour mostly. It’s really nice if you push the ‘hall’ setting just over halfway and get a slightly wetter tone.

9: Mr. Black Supermoon  It’s pretty much my signature sound and I can’t say enough good things about this reverb pedal. The effect is sort of indescribable; a bit like trying to explain the smell of cut grass or clean bed-sheets. Hehe. The ‘sway’ function gives you erie trails that go on forever. I’d say the upgraded Supermoon Chrome has more of a high-shimmer to it and is perhaps a little brighter, but this one is perfect for me.

And that’s it! I might incorporate a phaser and a volume pedal at some point, I’m not sure.

Enjoy

Pete