☆Joy Buzzer

If you clicked on this post you probably are as into effects unit as much as I am. I’m going to do a quick rundown of my rig and tell you about all the pedals I really like.

I’m moving to a switcher setup for 2025 since I’m tired of the tap dancing and the tone suck that comes with running over a dozen pedals in series. I thought those were really just buzzwords so people with switchers can get on your case about which boxes you really stomp on in a given set. I used to share my board with our trumpet player to gig with another group but that group isn’t active anymore and I’m going all in for myself for once.

In 2024 I scoured the internet for a switcher that would do well for me. I was looking for looooots of loops and at least 2 loops in stereo. I got a pretty smokin deal on a MusicomLabs EFX-V and it’s doing me right so far. 9 loops, all moveable, in and output buffers you can bypass if you’re a freak like me (running an output buffer after the fact because you have more stereo pedals than stereo loops.) It really makes the act of achieving great sounds as simple as set and forget. I’m working on the build right now still, just waiting on one more pedal that should be here today. When I gutted my old board I took off my GoodWood Interfacer which I will miss greatly. Passive and buffered I/O plus stereo sum just from holding the killswitch a second or two. The diva is RETIRED so if anyone needs a junction box for a stereo rig they can call me for a price or something. Unless I make a secondary board soon. We’ll see.

Signal chain:

From left to right my top row is a EHX Small Clone (weed mod from Japan,) Walrus D1 V2, Source Audio Gemini, Source Audio Kingmaker, DBA Rooms Reverb, TC HoF 2 mini (soon,) and my wireless with a tuner velcro’d to the top.

Middle Row is an Xotic EP, Korg Miku Stomp, and my EQ.

On the bottom level I have my switcher, Boss DD6 and Walrus Silt. I run 22 in cables out the side of my board for my volume pedal and I’ve decided I don’t need an expression pedal as I had one on the board I was just never using.

If there was room for one more pedal I would love to keep my TC Electronics MojoMojo, it’s a great overdrive and I will miss the way it cranked my pinch harmonics on even low settings. Got it for 50 bones in 2021 and haven’t stopped playing it until now. RIP.

The switcher is letting me get really creative. I have a few patches down so far, just getting started really. The brain on this thing is nuts and it feels like it’s built like a workhorse. I am able to run everything aside from my D1 and the Gemini through the loops (which you can reorder as well as run in parallel or series with different routing options.) It’s quite lame to have to read the manual every time I do setup stuff for the board but it’s proving to be worth it and the learning curve isn’t that steep.

I also have a Source Audio Neuro Hub on the underside of the board to run midi to the Kingmaker and Gemini for my presets, making everything after my switcher output Midi capable. The switcher feeds into the D1, into the Gemini, and into a Sum Mod by Temple Audio off the side of my board to keep cabling OFF the boards and to get stereo summation if I ever need it on a gig.

One of the main things I’m excited to try out is setting up parallel loops basically the way I do a lot of recording. Dry tones on one side, cavernous reverbs shoved into drives and fuzzes on the other. The SA One series pedals are really cool in that they are able to model the other pedals in the same series and effect type. With the Gemini having different programmable routing options as well, I am going to attempt to have a dry and wet loop swirling around each other, panning between 2 different amps.

Gain Staging:

The Kingmaker is able to model the LA Lady overdrive from the One series, so I am not missing out on having a nice drive on my board, even with less Mojo :/. Aside from that I run my EQ as a boost with a little extra hi-mids, my EP booster to push the drive and fuzz, and the Silt by Walrus Audio.

The Silt is amazing. It is a tube-driven fuzz, and whether or not the tube makes it sound better, it sounds freaking awesome. It can run 9V or 12V for more breakage, I usually keep it on 9V but it doesn’t share its power input with anyone so if and when I like to switch it to 12V it’s simple and clean to do so. The knobs feel primo and the enclosure is solid metal, powder-coated, with a big cool dinosaur skeleton on the face. Like I said. Freaking awesome. The second footswitch on this beast adds an octave up to your signal before the fuzz. When I’m running more than 5 effects I like to use this to go from walls of sounds to lines that you can actually hear.

Some other of my favorites:

Time for me to talk about all the other pedals on my board I love dearly.

Small Clone the first modulation pedal I ever bought was a EHX Neo Clone I got used for 30 bucks. It stayed with me for a while until I really started to look for where I was getting extra noise in my setup. I realized with as many pedals as I had on my old board the mini version of the Clone was just not cutting it. It would certainly work fine for a smaller board and would probably be okay on my board now that I’m on the switcher but I had the opportunity to get a minty Weed mod clone from Japan. They replace the transistors with actual audio-grade parts. The thing is loud and creamy and dreamy.

Rooms we all have things we like to consider our special secret ingredients. This guy is one of mine. DBA did a great job putting together 6 extremely creative and usable reverbs ranging from subtle room verbs to gated and filtered madness to a ring mod algorithm that will rock your socks off. Running this thing into any kind of rotary/pan situation is the cheat code to making the walls ache for sound. After I got this pedal I was introduced to the Source Audio line simply because I wanted a stereo fuzz on the cheap and the Rooms is best friends with my Kingmaker. It gets out of hand quickly but I like to use a gated reverb into the SA fuzz. They tend to play nice unless you dime everything.

DD6 Nothing too nuts about this guy, it usually stays as an always-on, slapback type if thing. The Walrus D1 is my main delay since it hooks up with the time clock in the switcher, and it performs many tasks amazingly. But having the DD6 so close to my feet feels like home. We will be losing Cole once the school year is over so I imagine you’ll see me holding down the footswitch to get extra feedback to carry into different sections of different songs. Or maybe I’ll want to run 2 reverse delays at a time with this and the D1. We’ll see.

Miku Stomp everyone said I wouldn’t use it. Everyone said I shouldn’t buy it. I like it, it’s fun. I think having vocaloid available at your feet is actually extremely musical and practical. It’s actually really cool and fun to put Miku first and make her run into the rest of the signal path.

EFX-V Switcher yeah this is the big one. I didn’t expect to have such a good time with all the menu diving and preset naming that goes into setting this thing up. Having full control to change the order of my pedals mid-song was simply not possible before. Midi makes it a whole other beast though. Everything in my setup, even the pedals not in loops, are fully configurable with many presets to store, and I’m able to change my fuzz to an overdrive while turning several other pedals on and off. It feels like the biggest treat I’ve given myself and every time I look down and see my custom presets looking back at me my tail starts wagging.

I think if you like this kind of stuff and you play an instrument with a pickup, get you some and start messing around. It really doesn’t take long to get used to how these little things work and it can take your creativity miles ahead if you can figure out what you’re doing. If the cost of most pedals is a barrier to entry for you, I’d say start with the $30 mini pedals you can find used online, replace them as you can afford if you like, or don’t.

That’s all for now um if I get more gear I may review it in another post. It’s just a little fun to yap and when my memory inevitably fails me I’ll have a record of how I’m feeling now.

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