Pedal Line Friday – 6/30 – Joe Perkins

Today’s Pedal Line Friday submission is from Joe Perkins. 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.

Pedal Line Friday – 6/30 – Joe Perkins

A few details about my rig!

Aside from the TU-2 (which is set up within my Loopmaster as a send with no return – so the signal never passes through it) the board is 100% analog. That’s just how I like to do things. The basic signal flow is: Effectrode PC-2A Compressor > Loopmaster > Jan Ray > Carl Martin Headroom > Suhr Buffer

The Effectrode PC-2A is always on – adding only a small bit of compression (to simulate the tube compression of an amp – so I can play quieter and still feel some squashiness!). It also buffers the whole board, warms up the tone, and acts as a slight boost. Everything is better with this pedal on!

The Jan Ray is on all the time too with the gain at zero, volume at unity & the tone controls (which are essentially High & Low pass filters, not active EQs) turned off. The flavour of the pedal alone adds a thickness to the low end which I love, but also lets me dial in an ‘edge of break-up’ sound at any volume without cranking the amp.

Side A of the Carl Martin Headroom is always active – with just a tickle of genuine spring reverb to make the sound a little more 3D (a bit like a drop shadow in Photoshop!) It’s footswitchable to side B which I have set to be much more of an obvious reverb effect.

The Suhr Buffer brings down any impedance that might have crept in throughout the board to keep everything super-defined going off to the amplifier – and also gives me an isolated second output to run a second amplifier in dual-mono.

And then, within the Loopmaster:

1) JAM Pedals Ripple Phaser – essentially a 2-stage MXR Phase 45 with more clarity.

2) A/DA Flanger PBF Reissue – can go from subtle to crazy! Generally have it set to a medium-intensity flange – nothing too extreme.

3) JAM Pedals Tubedreamer 58 + Wampler Tumnus + Bigfoot Octo Puss – My mid-boost loop! The TD58 is an asymmetrical-clipping Tubescreamer with incredible note clarity and less low-end roll off. The Tumnus does the Klon thing but doesn’t also doesn’t take off your low end (my major gripe with K-style pedals). The Bigfoot Octo Puss is an entirely passive Octave-Up effect which requires a buffered (or very strong) signal to work. I generally hit it with the TD58 with the level maxed out, but the Tumnus is buffered and feeds the Octo Puss a buffered signal even when it’s off.

4) Analog Man King Of Tone – the legend! I’ve only just got this pedal (18 months on the waiting list!) and I’m still dialing it in to be 100% to my tastes. I’m running it as two clean boosts cascaded into each other which I find gives me more dynamics than having the red side set as an OD. I do have the high gain mod on the red side – I’m not using it at high gain right now but it’s there if I ever need it.

5) Supro Drive + Wampler Tweed ’57 – these two are in the loop together as they’re my lower-gain, squashy ODs. I only ever use one at once, but often boost the front end with another pedal. Both sound great for that ‘tiny combo amp about to explode’ thing!

6) Wampler Plexi Drive – probably my favourite OD pedal. I run this at 18v via the GigRig Doubler (It’s designed to work with their own Generator PSU but runs fine if you give it a high-current 9v signal) I generally boost the front end of it with something like the TD58 or Tumnus to get it really singing!

7) JAM Pedals Waterfall Chorus – based on Boss CE-2 circuitry, but in ‘Deep’ mode sounds a lot like a Small Clone. I run it in ‘Deep’ mode but with the depth knob down as this gives a fuller-bodied sound.

8) Xotic EP Booster + EHX Memory Man Deluxe – a trick I nicked from watching That Pedal Show. An EP-style preamp (with the gain at zero) into the front of a Memory Man with modulation on the repeats is about as close as you can get to an Echoplex tape delay in the analog world without buying one of the original units! The EP Booster fattens & darkens the signal in such an awesome way.

9) JAM Pedals Delay Llama – A dirty, crunchy analog delay which can go a bit nuts. It feeds back easily, loses half your signal if you give it something with high gain and practically explodes if you give it a bassy signal…but in such an awesome way. It’s nice to have a delay which isn’t pristine or super-clean.

10) Hamstead Signature Tremolo – The exact Trem circuit that Hamstead built into their Artist 20 + RT amplifiers. I wanted a very simple analog Trem with square & sine wave Trems and some sort of level control, but nothing else. This one is unbelievable – I pretty much leave it in Signature (sine) mode as it’s so natural & useable.

My amplifier is a Hughes & Kuttner Puretone combo – Class A, single channel, hand wired point-to-point. The thing I like most is that you can completely dial out the EQ tone stack (which I do all the time), so it really is just Input, tubes, speaker. Nothing in between – as simple as an amp could possibly be. Having no EQ means that it takes pedals incredibly well – I’ve never found a pedal it doesn’t like. I’ve tried loads of amplifier and still only want to use this one for recording & gigging…it’s my ultimate amp!

Here is a YouTube vid of the board in action! 🙂

I think that’s about it! If you could credit my music page (www.facebook.com/joeperkinsmusic) that would be great! I’m going to try and film a youtube demo of some sounds from this board this week, so I’ll send that on if you’d like it! Oh, and anything else you’d like to know…please just ask!

Cheers! 🙂
Joe