Effects only

[TheyCallMeVolume]

In regards to #3, depending on how many preset buttons the board has and how any banks you can definitely set patches to turn individual pedal functions on/off, along with setting full tones with effects predetermined for them.

[Slartibartfarst42]

This does look like a highly effective system. I started out looking at the Boss GT-100 as a multi-fx that's good for effects but as it will be very rare secondhand, it will be the most expensive option. I then turned to the M13 but historically I've never been keen on Line 6 gear and I understand the drive models are very poor. Of course, the G-Major doesn't have any drive options but I suppose for what it would cost, I could always buy a good overdrive pedal.

[Toe-Knee]

This does look like a highly effective system. I started out looking at the Boss GT-100 as a multi-fx that's good for effects but as it will be very rare secondhand, it will be the most expensive option. I then turned to the M13 but historically I've never been keen on Line 6 gear and I understand the drive models are very poor. Of course, the G-Major doesn't have any drive options but I suppose for what it would cost, I could always buy a good overdrive pedal.

Well with the g major if you arent using the second relay you can get a little looper box that switchable via relay to have an OD (or any pedal) of your choice in and have it come in only on certain patches.

Of course if you want to go all out but its a lot more expensive theres the Nova Drive which is a midi overdrive pedal that you can switch via midi from the g major and have it adjust the settings also per patch.

[Slartibartfarst42]

Nothing used on Ebay for the Nova Drive sadly and a new one seems to be £200. That's an awful lot, even though I'm sure it's very good indeed. The M13 would undoubtedly be the cheapest option as the G-Major soon adds up. £150 for a used G-Major, £100 for a midi controller, £100 for a rack case and say £75 for a decent overdrive. That takes you to about the same as a new GT-100. Still, I'm sure it would be much better quality  :D

[juansolo]

This thread got me thinking about something that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, but might be ideal. Essentially people want analogue effects with the convenience of digital. Currently the only way I can think of doing that is having a drawer of pedals and some sort of midi switching thing.

My thought it why not make a rack with slot in analogue effects. Like an Egnator amp, but for effects. But with the midi switching built in. The biggest issue I can come up with doing things that way is the cost. It'd be a shite load to do it right. Otherwise it'd be pretty cool I reckon*



*yeah, still trying to come up with that perfect pedal idea which will stop be having to go back to work and get a proper job again.

[Brow]

I'll throw my 2cents in on the G-major thing too  :lol:

I currently use a very basic MIDI Controller (Rivera Headmaster, only 36 presets) into a Voodoo Labs Control Switcher and then a MIDI out from that to the G-Major.

The MIDI Controller into the VL Control Switcher allows me to switch Clean/OD channels, Low Gear/High Gear (think of these as additional gain settings with slight EQ differences), Boost on/off and solo volume on/off on my Splawn amp and then the MIDI out into the G-Major switches FX patches for chorus, flange, phase and delay, both with and without reverb. It makes for a very versatile rig that isn't overly complicated.

I only went for the Control Switcher instead of using the switching relay on the G-Major as Toe-knee mentioned because my amp uses stereo jacks for switching so I needed the different options of the voodoo labs unit.

[TheyCallMeVolume]

This thread got me thinking about something that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, but might be ideal. Essentially people want analogue effects with the convenience of digital. Currently the only way I can think of doing that is having a drawer of pedals and some sort of midi switching thing.

My thought it why not make a rack with slot in analogue effects. Like an Egnator amp, but for effects. But with the midi switching built in. The biggest issue I can come up with doing things that way is the cost. It'd be a shitee load to do it right. Otherwise it'd be pretty cool I reckon*



*yeah, still trying to come up with that perfect pedal idea which will stop be having to go back to work and get a proper job again.

For the pros who haven't moved on to the Axe-FX for at least their effects, let alone their whole rig, this is what they do. If you watch Premier Guitar's Rig Rundown's, and say a guy like Petrucci, you'll see he has a rack space full of pedals, which he controls through his MIDI switch. It looks so cool and easy, but I quickly found out it costs a TON of money.

After watching that I tried to mimic it by getting a pedal looper with DIP switches so I could set whole effect presets or just make a certain pedal that preset. I failed miserably and wound up losing a ton of money on it, most likely due to my wiring (un)capabilities. It did use it for a gig or two though and it was really nice having my giant, full pedalboard in the back with my amp and just having the little controller up front, but it didn't work the way I wanted. Shame really.

[Slartibartfarst42]

There's clearly demand for good multi-FX solutions that don't cost the earth and don't have amp modeling. It seems strange to me that more companies don't offer such an item. I've been looking at 4 units seriously so far and each one has its problems that you'd think could be easily fixed.

TC Electronic G-Major

Great effects but you'd need to buy drive pedals seperately as well as a Wah and a MIDI controller. It starts to rack up the cost and why buy an 'all-in-one' solution if you still have to buy additional pedals. There's the G-System of course but that's SERIOUS money even used.

TC Electronic Nova System

This is so close to what I need but again; no cigar. It has the drive section and it's even analog so it should be better than the digital offerings on other multi-FX but for some insane reason, you can't use the drive section as an overdrive for your own amp. I suppose if the drive section has a fantastic tone it would be OK but it would need to be going from light crunch to modern high gain to cover all my needs and remain tight enough by itself not to need an overdrive pedal to tighten things up a bit. I haven't yet had a chance to try this so I don't know if it can or not but from what I've read, it probably can't. Why buy a multi-FX unit to go with your favourite amp if you then can't use it on your amp's drive channel? The lack of an expression pedal is also a pain as I'd need to buy one of those too, if only for Wah. I also believe that there is some latency when changing patches and effects, which I imagine would soon become a pain. No latency, an expression pedal and the ability to use the 4CM would this pretty much perfect.

Line 6 M13

Sounds like a great idea and at first, four effects seemed like more than enough for me but then it struck me that if an EQ was one and a noise gate was another, both of which I use on almost every song, I'd only actually have two effects left to play with, which would be overdrive and delay. Anything else may have to be bought seperately, including a Wah pedal. On top of that, as with all of the Line 6 products I've tried, they tend to be very 'digital' and artificial sounding. The drive effects are usually very poor so I may need to use a seperate overdrive pedal which defeats the object of what I'm trying to do.

Boss GT-100

This one annoys me because I'm paying for a pile of amp modeling I'll never use but I'll grant you, that's not the end of the world. I imagine things like reverb, flanger, phaser, chorus and delay will be fine. If the noise gate, compressor and wah are better than on my RP1000 that would be a step up but as yet I have no idea if that's as good as I'd like and of course, we end up with the issue of a multi-FX unit's perrenial bugbear - the quality of the overdrives and distortions. It seems to me that this is invariably where multi-FX units fall down so this may well prove to be the acid test for this unit.

[Toe-Knee]

There's clearly demand for good multi-FX solutions that don't cost the earth and don't have amp modeling. It seems strange to me that more companies don't offer such an item. I've been looking at 4 units seriously so far and each one has its problems that you'd think could be easily fixed.

TC Electronic G-Major

Great effects but you'd need to buy drive pedals seperately as well as a Wah and a MIDI controller. It starts to rack up the cost and why buy an 'all-in-one' solution if you still have to buy additional pedals. There's the G-System of course but that's SERIOUS money even used.

TC Electronic Nova System

This is so close to what I need but again; no cigar. It has the drive section and it's even analog so it should be better than the digital offerings on other multi-FX but for some insane reason, you can't use the drive section as an overdrive for your own amp. I suppose if the drive section has a fantastic tone it would be OK but it would need to be going from light crunch to modern high gain to cover all my needs and remain tight enough by itself not to need an overdrive pedal to tighten things up a bit. I haven't yet had a chance to try this so I don't know if it can or not but from what I've read, it probably can't. Why buy a multi-FX unit to go with your favourite amp if you then can't use it on your amp's drive channel? The lack of an expression pedal is also a pain as I'd need to buy one of those too, if only for Wah. I also believe that there is some latency when changing patches and effects, which I imagine would soon become a pain. No latency, an expression pedal and the ability to use the 4CM would this pretty much perfect.

Line 6 M13

Sounds like a great idea and at first, four effects seemed like more than enough for me but then it struck me that if an EQ was one and a noise gate was another, both of which I use on almost every song, I'd only actually have two effects left to play with, which would be overdrive and delay. Anything else may have to be bought seperately, including a Wah pedal. On top of that, as with all of the Line 6 products I've tried, they tend to be very 'digital' and artificial sounding. The drive effects are usually very poor so I may need to use a seperate overdrive pedal which defeats the object of what I'm trying to do.

Boss GT-100

This one annoys me because I'm paying for a pile of amp modeling I'll never use but I'll grant you, that's not the end of the world. I imagine things like reverb, flanger, phaser, chorus and delay will be fine. If the noise gate, compressor and wah are better than on my RP1000 that would be a step up but as yet I have no idea if that's as good as I'd like and of course, we end up with the issue of a multi-FX unit's perrenial bugbear - the quality of the overdrives and distortions. It seems to me that this is invariably where multi-FX units fall down so this may well prove to be the acid test for this unit.

The G major has a wah! you just need a footcontroller with an expression pedal to use it. However being in the loop isnt optimal.

I dont mind needing to buy ODs etc as these items are very personal and there isnt really a one size fits all in this category. And well in general i dont need them because i tailor everything around being able to plug straight in as i hate trailing cables.

[Toe-Knee]

This thread got me thinking about something that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, but might be ideal. Essentially people want analogue effects with the convenience of digital. Currently the only way I can think of doing that is having a drawer of pedals and some sort of midi switching thing.

My thought it why not make a rack with slot in analogue effects. Like an Egnator amp, but for effects. But with the midi switching built in. The biggest issue I can come up with doing things that way is the cost. It'd be a shitee load to do it right. Otherwise it'd be pretty cool I reckon*



*yeah, still trying to come up with that perfect pedal idea which will stop be having to go back to work and get a proper job again.

The G-Lab GSC is a similar type of affair but pedalboard based.

The best way to do what you are wanting is to have the jacks & power on the back of the enclosures and hardwire some jacks into the rack unit that the pedals push onto.

Doing this with switching jacks would make it a lot more configurable.

The only limiting factor then would be the different sized pedals. The midi part itself is fairly easy and could be done with an arduino then some simple relays if you want to add amp switching in.

However as you said the cost would be ridiculous

[Slartibartfarst42]

I think I may just have stumbled across another option that looks great. The Carl Martin Quattro. It's all analog, the clips I've heard sound really good and it has most of the effects I need (overdrive, compressor, chorus and delay). It's in a nicely small package and does away with all the things I don't need. OK, I'd still need to buy a Wah pedal but it seems to be a quiet unit so a noise gate may not be essential and the only other effect I use in our set is a flanger but for one song, I'll live without it! I don't suppose anyone's tried one of these?