This year it will be 20 years since I started playing guitar. I’ve gone through quite a bit of various instruments, amps, pedals, recording interfaces, and other gear in that time, mainly motivated out of necessity rather than GAS.

I was always after playability and great tone, just like every guitar player, but gear is expensive, and certainly as a teenager and young adult it was impossible to justify spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on vacuum tube amps, boutique analog distortion pedals, and instrument cables made out of solid gold.

That meant that for the majority of my musical experience, I played through various digital modelers like the Digitech RPx400 that I started with, followed by a slew of Line 6 Pod variants over the years. These are $200-500 devices that provided enough flexibility to achieve different distorted, FX, and clean tones live while also allowing me to record music. The downside of course is that they just never sound particularly good, and require compromises in signal chains, noise, and latency.

A few years ago I really decided I was fed up with my live setup and it was time to start from scratch, this time focused on sound and aesthetics rather than cost, and build up a new rig. First, I sold all of my existing live gear other than my venerable Line 6 Pod HD400 and bought a Bugera 6260 2x12 combo amp. This is a cheap (but exact) clone of my favorite metal amp - the Peavey 5150, responsible for something like 50% of classic metal album guitar tones.

The Bugera has three channels (Clean, Crunch, Lead), built-in analog reverb, and a switchable FX loop. It came stock with (5) generic 12AX7 preamp tubes, and (4) equally generic 6L6 power amp tubes, that I replaced with bright, harmonically rich Tung Sol tubes as soon as I had the money, making a massive sonic difference.

I used my Pod as a front-end for the amp, basically just functioning as a noise gate and simulating an Ibanez TS-9 to get a tighter rhythm tone. This was a fine setup, but it wasn’t particularly flexible as far as effects, and ultimately had a tone of noise because of the Pod’s terrible FX loop. So the next step was to move away from modeling entirely towards an all-analog pedalboard.

The next step was to figure out what my key needs were as far as tone shaping. I narrowed it down to the following:

• Rhythm
  • Needs a tight noise gate, don’t want to fight amp feedback, breakdowns should be sharp.
  • Needs a “tube screamer”-like gain boost in front to tighten low end and increase pick attack, as the raw 5150 tone is a bit muddy.
• Clean
  • Should be moddable with various distortions to accomplish low-mid gain tones for contrast.
  • Should allow turning off noise gate for extra sustain.
  • Should have reverb available but not mandatory.
• Lead
  • High gain, warm, pick attack. Needs separate gain boost from rhythm channel (or even additional).
  • Need wah pedal
  • Need reverb
  • Need to be to disable noise gate and be able to induce feedback.
• FX
  • Some type of broken up/”special” tone with options to recombine various distortions.

The pedals I ended up with to accomplish these goals are:

• Fortin Zuul noise gate
  • Has the awesome “key” input feature to gate on clean guitar signal. Super tight gate.
  • Also got an active signal splitter to use with the key input.
• TC Electronics Polytune 3
  • Great polyphonic tuner.
• Dunlop original Cry-Baby Wah pedal
  • Set up in front right after the splitter so it’s available for all tones.
• Aion Stratus DIY kit
  • Ibanez Tube Screamer clone with options for different clippers and bass boost.
  • Used for Rhythm/Lead front-end
• GCI Kurt Ballout “business card” DIY kit
  • Circuit is “Brutalist Jr.” overdrive
  • Used for Lead gain stage and FX
• Gamechanger Audio Plasma Pedal
  • Crazy sounding xenon tube-based distortion/saturation.
  • Used for FX, broken up tones.
• MOEN GEC8-JR Looper
  • To be able to program all of my tone combinations.
  • Has 2 pools * 10 banks of settings.
  • Also has 3 programmable footswitch outputs to control my amp (channel clean/lead, FX loop on/off, reverb on/off)

I also got the Voodoo Power 2 pedal power supply and Gator G-Tour LGW flight-case for the actual pedalboard.