With my melodic rock band, FM RADIO, I am the entire band: live guitar & Arturia Beatstep Pro providing drums, bass, and synth. That's a lot to carry! So, my biggest issue is always space and convenience. To that end, I re-addressed my live situation and scaled down the pedals whilst scaling UP the amp wattage.
My previous setup was using the Studio 2 with the amp well into breakup and then just adding thickness and additional gain, as well as compression/modulation/delay with pedals. I used a Rapid Fire looper to switch between 2 flavours of gain: crunchy drive with the Bogner Uberschall and MXR micro flange and heavy drive with the Empress Heavy and strymon DECO. I used the Heavy Electronics Descend to clean the tone up.
That, unfortunately has three drawbacks:
One, it is a lot to carry
Two, it is a lot to troubleshoot should something go wrong
Three, the amp simply doesn't cover it live without adding a second one
So, I switched to my Bumbox Cielo which is essentially a JMP50 with reverb (the reverb is valve-driven and can be taken out of the circuit for additional gain.
I then revisited my pedal selection from scratch and rebuilt the board using my Pedaltrain Nano.
First up was my base tone: I wanted to keep the tone of the Cielo but give it a touch more focus and cut some of the overhang off (this amp has a LOT of bass response; you could easily use it as a bass amp).
Drive pedals I own: Way Huge Green Rhino, Xotic BB Preamp, JCollocia Horus
The Horus was the best one for my needs: totally transparent but it added just a hint of girth and focus to the tone. This pedal is now discontinued but I am always pleasantly surprised with how great it sounds.
Next up was increasing the gain from mild breakup to crunch (the Bumbox is capable of a very nice crunch tone, but at the expense of blistering volume; it's easier to just do it this way).
Boost pedals I own: Thundertomate Fat Boost, Catalinbread Naga Viper, AnalogMan Beano Boost, Greer Sweetback Driver, zvex SHO, Bogner Harlow
I tried all of them after the Horus and they all did the job well, but the one that fit the best was the SHO; the SHO is a fantastic pedal; it adds lots of sustain and creates a HUGE guitar tone. It is far from transparent, but complemented the Horus really well.
To be honest, I can gig with just the Horus/SHO combination; it's 90%+ of the tone I was after. But, I still had 2 slots open on the Nano, and I need more gain for metally bits and solos. So, I was looking for light modulation.
I don't have many modulation pedals: strymon DECO, MXR Script 90, Maestro PH1, Mooer chorus, MXR micro flange.
The DECO was selected, but I really learned a lot about its character with this more bare sonic setup: DECO has a VERY soft knee; it begins clamping down on the transients immediately and the overall effect is a softening of the leading edge of the tone; I compensated for this by bringing up the HOT preamp on the Bumbox. I added just a touch of lag to widen the sound but otherwise left the pedal at unity gain and just let it do the tape saturation/compression thing.
For the second gain stage, I revisited all of my remaining boost and distortion pedals (MXR distortion+ along with all the others mentioned). They all added varying amounts of insane metal style distortion with all of the other pedals in front! I particularly liked the sound of the Beano Boost here: the tone was VERY close to my Splawn QuickRod. However, it was entirely too noisy and created howling feedback ... plus, I have no need for that much distortion. :) So, in the end I went with the Harlow, set the boost low and let the Neve transformer do most of the work.
End result: Pretty huge guitar tone, I must say. Clips soon.
Amp settings:
Pedal settings:
