TheGreatGreen
Well-known member
Most pieces of gear are bus tickets, not Ubers. They get you most of the way there but almost never all the way. I’ve always thought of EQ as the Uber you take from the bus stop to where you really want to go.
If I could only have two pedals in a rig, tuner aside, I’d have two EQ pedals. One in front to boost / shape the guitar and character of the distortion, and the other in the loop to pick up where the amp EQ leaves off. But I can’t really imagine needing much more than that.
I know Tosin Abasi used to use a mid boost pedal exclusively after a Friedman BE-OD pedal because it needed a mid boost that nothing else in his rig needed, but edge cases like that aside, once you have more that that, yeah it does start to feel silly.
Here’s another example, in my home studio (where I don’t have to worry about portability) I have a Strymon DIG that I mostly love except for one thing it does that basically ruins the entire pedal. Its Tone control does not darken the first repeat. I could strangle those assholes at Strymon for ruining an otherwise basically perfect delay like that. Anyway, I route it into a parallel mixer in pedal format called the Parallelizer II. It adds parallel stereo loops to your signal path. In one of the loops, I have a ParaEQ going into the DIG. I use the ParaEQ to darken my core tone going into the DIG as well as to scoop out some mids to clear things up a bit, then I set the DIG to kill dry and with that in parallel with my dry core tone, out comes the perfect darkened ping pong delay sound. Yes it’s cumbersome as hell and there’s no way I’d be caught dead using that Rube Goldberg contraption live, but in the studio I haven't found a delay I like better than an EQ into a DIG in parallel with the core sound, so that's what I use there. Live I’d just use a Keeley Halo or something that gets dark on its own. It doesn’t do ping pong but… close enough for live.
But the guy in the OP is using two post distortion EQ's which to me seems redundant. He's using one EQ right after his distortion pedals and a stereo EQ after all his loop effects as an overall tone shaper. Why wouldn't he just set the stereo EQ to also do the job of the EQ after the distortion pedals? It even has presets so he could set a preset for distortion pedals off, and another preset for distortion pedals on.
If I could only have two pedals in a rig, tuner aside, I’d have two EQ pedals. One in front to boost / shape the guitar and character of the distortion, and the other in the loop to pick up where the amp EQ leaves off. But I can’t really imagine needing much more than that.
I know Tosin Abasi used to use a mid boost pedal exclusively after a Friedman BE-OD pedal because it needed a mid boost that nothing else in his rig needed, but edge cases like that aside, once you have more that that, yeah it does start to feel silly.
Here’s another example, in my home studio (where I don’t have to worry about portability) I have a Strymon DIG that I mostly love except for one thing it does that basically ruins the entire pedal. Its Tone control does not darken the first repeat. I could strangle those assholes at Strymon for ruining an otherwise basically perfect delay like that. Anyway, I route it into a parallel mixer in pedal format called the Parallelizer II. It adds parallel stereo loops to your signal path. In one of the loops, I have a ParaEQ going into the DIG. I use the ParaEQ to darken my core tone going into the DIG as well as to scoop out some mids to clear things up a bit, then I set the DIG to kill dry and with that in parallel with my dry core tone, out comes the perfect darkened ping pong delay sound. Yes it’s cumbersome as hell and there’s no way I’d be caught dead using that Rube Goldberg contraption live, but in the studio I haven't found a delay I like better than an EQ into a DIG in parallel with the core sound, so that's what I use there. Live I’d just use a Keeley Halo or something that gets dark on its own. It doesn’t do ping pong but… close enough for live.
But the guy in the OP is using two post distortion EQ's which to me seems redundant. He's using one EQ right after his distortion pedals and a stereo EQ after all his loop effects as an overall tone shaper. Why wouldn't he just set the stereo EQ to also do the job of the EQ after the distortion pedals? It even has presets so he could set a preset for distortion pedals off, and another preset for distortion pedals on.
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