Pedal Line Friday – 10/13 – Alexander Schorn

Today’s Pedal Line Friday submission is from Alexander Schorn . 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 – 10/13 – Alexander Schorn

My name is Alex from Freiburg, Germany, and I play bass in a post-punkish new wave kind of band called Noisecon (https://www.facebook.com/noisecon/). I’ve been following the Pedal Line Friday series for quite some time now and thought I’d share a picture of my pedalboard with you.
(Sorry for the poor cellphone quality of the pictures.)

So, let’s begin:

My pedalline starts off with a Shure wireless unit, which is not in the pictures as I just got it a few days ago. From there the signal hits the Darkglass Super Symmetry Compressor and the EQ side B7K Ultra, which are both always on and give me ‘clean’ sound. If I decide that a (part of a) song needs more punch I’ll just add the drive side of the B7K on top of that.

From here the signal gets split in two by the Gigrig Humdinger and sent to my Ampeg SVT VR on one side and to the DOD Meatbox re-issue on the other. The Meatbox is a monstrous sub-octave synth pedal that’s just massive. I mostly use it combined with some fuzz and/or modulation to get a synth kinda feel to my bass.

Next up is the Gigrig G2 looper switcher, which basically is the heart of my board and makes life so much easier.

Let’s go through the loops:

Loop 1: The Walrus Audio Luminary is a great octave pedal that can do so much more just that. The possibility to store up to three presets comes in quite handy and allows me to use the pedal for a variety of sounds without having to adjust the knobs all the time.

Loop 2: In loop 2 you can find my beloved Moog MoogerFooger Ring mod, which has been with me for years and won’t leave my board any time soon. I use this one for a ‘swaying’ kind of sound that you can quite prominently in our song ‘Everybody’s game’. The best ring mod I’ve tried so far.

Loop 3: Now we start hitting the drive section with the TWA Dynamorph. A very cool pedal that is capable of a lot of great sounds ranging from filter to complete and utter sonic mayham. I like to use this one in combination with the Meatbox for a filtery, fuzzy sub sound.

Loop 4: The Walrus Audio Jupiter V2 that I got from my girlfriend for my birthday. I love this one because it doesn’t take away your low end and can get you a very aggressive fuzz sound with a lot of feedback. Gotta love fuzz.

Loop 5: Fuzzrocious Zuul. Overdrive. Oscillation. Not much more to say than that it’s an awesome pedal. I really love the overdrive circuit on this one and the oscillator gives it a nice and weird character. I have this loop set to ‘stompbox mode’ on the G2 so I can add it on top of any of my presets to give them more drive, depth and weirdness.

Loop 6: The Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl Mk 2 is an awesome chorus with way more options than anybody could ever use, I guess. I like it a lot on quieter songs and chordy stuff especially paired with some reverb.

Loop 7: With the Chase Bliss Spectre flanger it’s basically the same as with the Warped Vinyl. I’m barely scraping the surface of what this pedal can do, but nontheless I love what it does. I’ve always preferred flange to phase, though I don’t really know why, but adding this on top of a fuzz takes your tone a whole new level. An I also love the ‘whale sounds’ this pedal produces in the crazier settings.

Loop 8 Let’s get weird with the Fuzzrocious and Dwarfcraft collaboration Afterlife of Pitch, that combines Fuzzrocious’ Afterlife with Dwarfcraft’s Wizzard of Pitch. It’s a sick pitch shifter and reverb with hold and oscillation footswitches that gives you a lot of options to mess up your signal and can get really weird really fast. Like the Zuul I have this one in ‘stomp box’ mode so I can ‘weirdify’ (is that even a word?) any of my presets.

Loop 9: The Earthquaker Devices Avalanche Run is a combination of delay and reverb. It recently replaced my Walrus Audio Bellwether, which I really love but it was missing the oscillation footswitch that the Avalanche Run offers. This pedal has some cool hidden features like a ring mod kinda sound, which makes it fun to experiment.

Loop 10: Last but not least in loop 10 you see the Walrus Audio Descent (Yes, I love Walrus Audio). It’s a pretty big pedal, but if you ask me it’s worth the pedalboard real estate. It sounds beautiful, has a ton of options and once again offers the option to save presets. Adding this on top of the Luminary or the Warped Vinyl can give you truely amazing results.

From the G2 the signal now goes to the Mesa Boogie Bass Strategy that’s hooked up to a Hirschfelder B212G18 (2 closed 12″ speakers and one 18″ speaker combined) and can give you an absolutely massive sound if you want.

What do you think?

Thanks for having me and all the best,

Alex.