I am looking at buying a guitar FX switcher to run a slightly more complicated switching rig than I’ve ever used personally. In the past, I’ve used either an amp’s distortion or run a series of pedals in the studio for a particular sound. Live I keep things simple so that less can go wrong. My needs are changing a bit now.
I would like to be able to control about four different tones from a master switcher pedal. I would like something that can incorporate my amps (Mesa Boogie) pedal into the chain.
I’ve been experimenting with stacking stompboxes into my high gain channel of my amp with cool results, however, changing in and out of this sound to a clean sound requires hitting four pedals.
Diagram the signal chain if you can. When pro techs are designing these, usually what happens is they have the client draw an imaginary switcher unit that accounts for the signal flow from all the pedals and the necessary amps. This gives an overview then tweaks can be made from there.
Combining pedals is hard, and you wanna avoid tap-dancing. I went to the Mesa Tri-Axis and G system for that exact reason. The I/O on both units can be midi-controlled, and the presets account for combinations of pedals in different places through the signal chain.
Here’s what I ended up with. I’ve been working with it for over 2 years and haven’t had to change it since about March of 2016.
I researched this a little while ago, and this was the one that seemed the most comprehensive and flexible - The Gigrig G2. It configures pedals as well as switches amp channels. The thing I really liked about it was the ability to set gain staging on both the inputs and outputs of each pedal loop, and the fact that the gain is individually programmable for each patch. I never ended up getting one, as I rarely play live anymore, but it would definitely be worth investigating IMO.
