Let's see those pedalboards!

[Pepe]

How comes that you don't have the DingoTone BSD on that board?

[sclitheroe]

How comes that you don't have the DingoTone BSD on that board?

BSD and SQO swap in and out with the BD-2w and SD-1, depending on mood. I only put the board together like a week ago, give it a couple days.

[fuzzbuzzfuzz]

Long post but you asked about the Caroline pedals

I've fancied one of Tim's (Fredric Effects) Harmonic Percolator clones for a while. He also makes a modified version: http://www.fredric.co.uk/utility-perkolator

What are those Caroline pedals like? Not familiar with those.

I debated which to get, and I decided I didn't want a tamed Percolator, I wanted more percolation Hiss is fine (I like a bit of hiss from my dirtiest dirt, to be honest..that's the sound of rock and roll at idle), and I really wanted it to bring the wool, so it's ideal. The Catalinbread is really good too, but this one is dirtier. Now that I've played two variants, I can also say both can be used as very passable overdrives at low gain. It's a fantastic circuit in my opinion. Doubt you could go wrong with any of Tim's percolator's, to be honest.

The Caroline Guitar Company stuff has been great, and I really like their design and tonal style. The Meteore is a lo-fi reverb with a gain control for overdriving the verb circuit, and a second footswitch for inducing self-oscillation. It's bouncy, reflective, and can be thunderous with the overdrive adding dirt in your reverberated signal. Tons of fun for crank-addled surf or a late night Cramps bender.

The Parabola is Caroline's take on a Schaller / West Germany trem. So it's a breathy, bubbly trem that isn't clinical - it has that slight throb and breath to it. I'd had Catalinbread's Valcoder, which I think is also loosely based on the circuit. Awesome chop, same beautiful throb, but very, very limited adjustability. If they'd worked harder on the range of control I would have kept it. Ironically, if I hadn't gotten the Parabola, I'd have gotten Fredric Effects version of the Schaller - once I'd heard that circuit, I knew that was the one for me, and I'm positive, after playing the Harmonic Percolator, that Tim has probably done it justice too. The Parabola also has this neat AM/FM switch. AM is straight amplitude modulation, the FM, I don't understand how it works, but it manages to sit the trem underneath your attack somehow. It makes the trem very usable as a subtle always on effect. And it comes with an overdrive (sense a theme for me? )

The Shigeharu is the biggest, most gainy, most impossibly bold, bassy (if you want) and heavy IC based Muff circuit you've ever heard. I've never played, nor even heard a pedal with more Muff style gain than this thing is possible of delivering. A NYC Muff on full gain is maybe half what this thing can do. And then you step on the octave and introduce a transformer driven, blendable Octave fuzz over top. Since it's IC, even at full bore it remains just tight enough to hold it all together. Played through my '59 Bassman LTD with a hollow body Gretsch will basically set all the heating ducts in my house resonating and vibrating It's a gut punch. It's a little frightening/intimidating, in fact. It's good.

Hawaiian Pizza I have the least experience with (only had it a few days now). It's a fuzz, with input level and a voltage control. Not sure what it's based on, but super responsive to picking dynamics and guitar volume, and can go from gated and broken with a hint of ring mod to glassy/gritty OD to full on fuzz face family roar. I like a gritty, compressed/crumbly overdrive or light distortion tone, that kind you really only get from a pedal with a voltage starve (and kinda what I hear in my head for the tone I want for myself), so, so far, this thing is working out well. Other cool things - the input knob (the pig) is treble bled, so it gets brighter as you turn down the gain and doesn't mud up. It also has a transformer based, internally switchable pickup simulator that let's it go anywhere on a board, buffer in front or not. I didn't love the sound of it pushed by other effects, so it's up front on the board and I didn't need it, but I could see it being useful, and in testing, it does work and helps retain the responsiveness to volume controls on the guitar.

My board is funny now - I like the order I have all the effects in (I always run trem before the Muff, even when it was a NYC and a TR-2, as an example), and I didn't deliberately set out to arrange it how it ended up. And yet the split down the middle is quite apparent to me - I love my Boss pedals, and I use them lots, but that's the "safe" side of the board with more conventional gain, verb, delay, etc. The right side of the board is the tone I like and what I'd like my own sound to be like. But it's not always suitable for covering stuff or playing with others who want to jam on covers (or at least I haven't found people that want to jam on Cramps and Link Wray tunes all night )



I can see my board staying this way for a while now.

-Scott

Damn those Caroline pedals sound right up my street (as do your dirt descriptions!)

[fuzzbuzzfuzz]

Ok here’s mine freshly assembled this very afternoon. So it’ll probably change after practice due in a few hours!

A1863BE4-107E-40BA-98E2-C291BEB54AA6.jpeg (68.52 KiB) Viewed 11181 times

Key here was to have a big sound yet unaffected ed by EQ changes, so a non piecing fuzz, modulation with good dry-through etc. Also using the Shin-Ei as a pre-amp to drive a Blues Jr and the Mid-Booster pedal to (ironically) reduce mids/act as a “clean” button. VPW is new to me, as is using CP-9 comp to control the overall amount of bass hitting the amp (which flubs badly if untamed).

[Joske Turbo]

Not the best of pictures but this is my latest board:

[laurie]

Some nice gear there!

[natthu]

My main board is currently receiving an overhaul, so in the meantime I put together this little board.
Built in patch bay (4x TRS), modded the board to fit the PSU to one end, added a bridge plate for the tuner, soldered up some custom TRS cables for the EXP inputs. It works a treat

> PolyTune > JB-2 > Particle > Avalanche Run >
+ Expression inputs for the Particle and Avalanche Run

[Gasgano]

Sweet!

[sclitheroe]

How is the JB-2? I was going to ask if you like it, but it's on your board, so I assume you do

-Scott

[natthu]

How is the JB-2?

It's good

Using an LS-2, I used to run a crunch distortion (ZVex Distortron or similar) and a fuzz (Some sort of Muff) in parallel to achieve my drive sound. The JB-2 does the same trick in one pedal instead of three. The sounds it can do, although good, aren't exactly the ones I would have chosen for it. However, it does the parallel drives thing quite well. It's perfect for a small board like this where you have to compromise a little for the sake of space but still want to have options.