Pedal Line Friday – 11/6 – Carl Miller

Today’s Pedal Line Friday submission is from Carl Miller. 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.

Here’s the Lowdown:

The instrument is connected into the patchway in the upper left, which feeds into the Ernie Ball VPjr Volume Pedal.  The Volume Pedal feeds into the Electro-Harmonix Hum Debugger to kill any additional hum from any single coil pickups I might be using. The signal from the Hum Debugger is then fed into the first Boss Loop Station which is used for ‘pre-effects’ recording.  This allows me to record a riff and play it over and over as I adjust the effects behind it, without have to actually continually repeat my own playing to play with different effect combinations.  From the first Loop Station, I feed a line into the upper center patchway to output to my Dunlop Crybaby 535q customizable Wah Pedal.  The Wah pedal is then fed back into the patchway which then feeds into my distortion line.

As you can see, the distortion line gives me a wide array of tonal options with overdrive and distortion. This line includes a Boss DS-1 Distortion, a Boss Super OverDrive SD-1, a Boss Blues Driver BD-2, and finally an MXR Fullbore Metal.  the Distortion line then feeds into my other effects, which includes a Boss Tremolo TR-2, an MXR Black Label Chorus, and an MXR micro Flanger.  The signal is then fed back into the upper middle patchway and outputted to the Fender Mustang Floor Multi Effects pedal.  Here, I often utilize other effects that I desire that I do not have on my board, including delay, reverb, vibrato, phaser, and additional options for distortion as well as amp modeling.  As you can see, the Mustang floor has a programmable expression pedal as well that allows me more instant control over the effects that I use the floor for.  The signal is then fed back to the patchway and then into my JHS prestige booster/buffer pedal, which can be used simply to instantly boost my signal or to make up for any signal loss over all of these stomps.  We clean things up with the MXR smartgate to clear up any other signal fuzz that may occur during the signal processing.  From the smartgate, I feed into the second Loop Station where I can then record anything ‘post effects’.

From the Loop station we feed things back into the patchway in the upper left hand corner which outputs to the amp or pa system.  The patchways were hand wired and built by http://loop-master.com/ and I use ProCo for all of my wiring needs.  The effects board is a PedalTrain Pro 2 and the the board is powered by a Voodoo labs Pedal Power 2 Plus. Both of the Loop Stations and the Mustang floor have USB interfaces which I use to control and manipulate from a computer laptop.  I also use the aux input on the mustang floor to input different backing tracks I have stored on my PC or phone that I can play over.  It’s all a lot of fun to be able to dial up just about every tone I can think of.

Carl Miller