Show Your Pedalboards!

[christianm77]

The Freeze pedal does NOT the same functionality as a Loop. I have both.

It's a pretty popular pedal among jazz players. The ability to layer sounds on sounds is pretty powerful.

This is the sort of thing a lot of people do with it... Kurt is using a HOG, but the function he is using is basically the same as a Freeze pedal

[Tal_175]

I was thinking of it's application as a practice tool since OP said he is a beginner.
But on a second thought may being "spoon fed" chord tones by freezing drones and playing over them may actually accelerate ear training initially (compared to looping comps).
Cool video BTW. Though I have an old school preference for achieving pianistic complexity by working within the limitations of guitar.

[christianm77]

Listen to Mr Wampler

[gmek]

Freeze and delay are some of my favorite effects... but I agree with the other guys here, get your playing in order first. Maybe you can reward yourself with a pedal after you learn a couple new tunes?

[jockster]

Update:

OK so I did not take my own advice..... and am now the proud owner of

Mojo Hand Mirrorball delay pedal (Analog Delay w/ Modulation)
EHX Freeze


I have not had time to dive deep into setting's of both pedals yet but I am really, really liking the tone with a touch of delay.

Now back to Autumn Leaves arpeggio's....

Cheers, Simon

[Kathmandu Cat]

My bare-essential jazz pedals. TC Ditto Mini Looper, HOF Mini, Spark Mini Boost plugged into a vintage Polytone Mini Brute.

[jazzgtrl4]

Sorry for the upside down pic but ive been working on putting together a small battery powered board. Used it last night for the first time last night and it worked great. Hotone Soul Press Vol/wah> MXR CC> One Control Persian blue reverb. all powered by a pedaltrain Volto. I have a Freeze and a Boss OC-3 i havent put on there yet. Might get a ditto looper. Also i heard they are making a MXR CC mini with bright switch!. which i might get.

[JaxJaxon]

I would get a looper for shure. Then a reverb, Delay, OD. get a reverb that will do many diffrent styles of reverb, spring, Plate, Hall. Get a looper that can save to different slots.

[LiamBlack]

In the beginning, when I started my training, I used a similar model: Wampler Triple Wreck V2

[radiofm74]

TC Polytune. Might be all the pedalboard you need

[christianm77]

I am rather dependent on a clean boost these days.

[P.J.]

If you already have a looper you can practice playing over chords. I have always thought the Freeze is kind of wonky sounding. Not a fan. YMMV, of course.

[guavajelly]

Well, to emulate the players you like you don't need any pedals. You don't need more reverb than what your amp provides in the just about open range.
The looper is a great tool for practicing (I have a TC ditto for that) or if you want to dive into ambient music. ;-). Personally I have not used any pedals at gigs for years, but at home I sometimes fool around with a Wah (I had my Cry Baby since the 90s) a cheap Tube Screamer Clone, a Tremolo and sometimes the boost and delay in my Tech 21 Fly Rig.
Our organ player wants me to use a wah in the band (60s/70s funky organ jazz) but so far I could avoid it. ;-) May try it at the next gig, though to make him happy.
Was that helpful? I guess not. LOL.

[WillMbCdn5]

I like this setup so far -

Big old acoustic archtop with a pickup added into an Empress Para EQ into a Catalinbread Talisman plate reverb into a Quilter Microblock 45 amp into an Eminence Legend 1258 in a homemade cabinet. Kind of a deconstructed basic combo amp- bit of tone control/bit of reverb/bit of amplification ) Whole amp/pedal/speaker thing weighs less than 20 lbs . Lots of tone manipulation opportunities in the chain. Zoom IQ6 into an iPhone 7 into Garageband for creating loops/chord changes to practice soloing over.

Will

[benrosow]

Xotic Effects EP Booster: great boost unit in any circumstance. Just sounds good.
I use a Carbon Copy. It als osimply sounds good. You can get fancier and probably "better" or certainly more versatile (think Strymon products) but if you don't need programmability and you like the analog delay sound, you will always like the carbon copy.

[Ryo17]

I am a gigging jazz musician and I play in big bands and combo group. I play all sort of genre from funk, blues, and sometimes I use distortion.

Currently I own a cry baby wah pedal and a boss ds1 distortion pedal.

I am going to start building my own pedal board.

What setup do you guys think is necessary for my circumstance?
and please share your guy’s pedal boards!!

[starjasmine]

For straight jazz gigs I just use a tube amp and maybe put a volume pedal in the fx loop. I'm happy with that sound, even though many players nowadays use a digital hall reverb instead of old-school spring reverb. In addition to being able to adjust volume hands-free and do all those cute 80s volume pedal tricks, the vol pedal allows me to tune silently without a clip-on tuner and without changing any settings on the guitar.

For gigs that require fx I use a multifx unit in the fx loop of an all-tube amp, with the guitar plugged straight into the amp. This give me nice tube preamp tone and nice tube power section crunch with the convenience of preprogrammed fx. Vol pedal goes between fx send and fx return of the fx unit, with an inline tuner between the out of the vol pedal and the fx return on the fx unit. Up to this point, the signal is mono. The final out of the fx unit is stereo but I've programmed all the patches to be usable as L channel only; i.e. the dry signal is center panned with a little effected signal folded back into both channels.

I don't always like the distortion from the fx unit alone, so I use a channel-switching amp that allows me to switch to the distortion channel on the amp when I need a bit of extra sauce. Basically I can go anywhere from a little dirt to unlimited gain with a nice tubey saturation and clip, with whatever sort of fx I want.

When using the digital fx, I turn off the amp's spring reverb entirely and just use the digital fx verb.

I have this fx unit in a two-space rack that has a shoulder strap. The other space contains a 60WRMS/side stereo SS power amp.

This allows the following rigs, from simplest and smallest to most elaborate:

- one tube amp; optionally, add vol pedal.
- just the two-space rack and one speaker cab; two if I want stereo out
- tube amp and two space rack. Add one speaker cab if I want stereo out.
- two tube amps and two space rack if the gig motivates me to haul that much iron.

@beaumont: yes I carry spare pre- and power tubes :-) though I've almost never needed them. Hell, anytime I use fx, I have a spare AMP in that little rack :-)

That said, my multifx is pretty dated: it's a Digitech GSP-21. I haven't played a lot of fx-ey gigs in a long time, as I've been gravitating towards trio or solo standards with one cord and one amp and maybe that vol pedal :-) If I were updating fx with affordability and portability in mind I'd look into a BOSS ME, maybe a TC G system... IDK, I haven't shopped for fx in a long time, given my almost exclusive interest in an old-school tubey solo jazz trio format these days, so I look forward to hearing about what other forumites recommend for fx.

I have yet to hear a modeler that I like more than the real tube amp right next to it, but if I were doing a lot of pop gigs or cramped pit work, I might go there, just for convenience.

I've spoken to a few traveling pros that generally take their guitar as a carryon with just a distortion pedal, delay pedal, and chorus pedal in a backpack. Just a minimal setup that they can use with whatever amp the venue provides.

HTH

SJ

Update: this is a pic off the net but it shows the foot controller and front panel layout. The foot controller can be set up as 10 banks x 5 patches each bank or 10 banks x 10 patches per bank. In 5-per-bank mode, the top switches turn individual efx off/on and in 10-per bank mode, the top-row switches just call up more patches that you program. Programming the unit is pretty straightforward. At one point, I was beta-testing an external editor that would allow you to use a Mac to program the unit and back up all your patches; sadly, this app never came to market. You can dump all the patches from one GSP-21 to another via MIDI. I actually have a second one of these units that I bought when the first one started having some intermittent audio output issues over a decade of daily use; I got the other unit cheaply on eBay and I didn't have to go through six months of new gear hell trying to dial in all the patches that I had tweaked so painstakingly over the years. I just dumped all the patches from my existing unit to the new one and got on with my life. One of these days, I'll pull that thing apart and find the bad trace or crappy solder joint...

Apparently, there's still a lot of love for the GSP21 Legend after all these decades - people are still saying nice things about them on Harmony Central and The Gear Page. My only gripe with it is that I found the master volume level for each patch not quite precise enough at low volumes when one patch used distortion and the other didn't. On a loud gig, I generally opted for the distortion patch being a little too loud than a little too quiet. On a quiet gig, I could quickly reprogram the master volume level to bring that volume down a bit. TBH, I have a handful of go-to patches programmed into the first two banks, and rarely use more than that, but there are 234 individual user presets. IIRC, something like 99 of them are factory defaults but you can overwrite anything you want.

[rpjazzguitar]

I am a gigging jazz musician and I play in big bands and combo group. I play all sort of genre from funk, blues, and sometimes I use distortion.

Currently I own a cry baby wah pedal and a boss ds1 distortion pedal.

I am going to start building my own pedal board.

What setup do you guys think is necessary for my circumstance?
and please share your guy’s pedal boards!!

Boss ME80. I use the reverb and I have my foot on the volume pedal whenever I play.

I have four patches I use regularly. Clean, slight chorus, distortion and a solo tone (mostly based on octaver).

I can get an adequate sound out of almost any amp, using the ME80.

I've never compared it to individual pedals. I like the convenience, the ability to save a patch and I can get my sound. Also, the ME80 is almost entirely controlled with knobs. There are no menus and no scrolling.

[starjasmine]

Nice ME-80 demo from Rob Marcello, rock tones only:

His ME-70 demo walks through more of the different sounds, from built-in JC120 chorus to chicken-pickin' slap and there's a jazz tone demo at 7:42 - which is not bad considering the light-gauge strings and maple neck:

And just cuz Rob is such a badass, here's his ME-25 demo:
YouTube
I've seen him demo the BOSS ME boxes live, going straight out of the multifx to a SS Roland Cube or two, and it sounds just like these demos do. Tho I am a total tube-amp snob, I've GASed for a BOSS ME-70 or better ever since.

[fep]

There are a lot of pedals these days that are "True Bypass", and then there are still the pedals with "buffers".

I didn't know this when I put together my pedal board, but I have now learned I should have a pedal with a buffer as the first pedal in my signal chain. After that, true bypass pedals are fine and are what I have. Having the buffer in the 1st pedal mitigates the "tone suck" of multiple pedals and long cable runs.

If I was starting over I would consider the above. As an alternative, my 1st pedal is a (true bypass) compressor and I leave it on. I'll dial down the compression level when I don't want the compression but the pedal is still on. I read you can do this and the pedal being on creates a buffer.

I use a Quilter Micropro which I think is a good platform for a pedal board. My favorite and most used pedal is really two overdrives in one pedal and is not expensive:

For a Humbucker demo with only a touch of overdrive, here is King of Blues "Engine A", overdrive at about 11 o'clock and tone neutral. Front pickup of my Ibanez semi-hollowbody.

[rpjazzguitar]

I had an ME50. I still have the ME70 and ME80. There wasn't that much difference, for my purposes between the 50 and the 70. But, the 80 has 8 pedals instead of 4 -- although that's not as big a deal in real life as it is on paper. It makes going to the tuner a little easier because you don't have to click two pedals at once. It will turn more things on and off, with one click, so if you're a manual mode user, or you have a zillion patches, it might be more flexible.

The 80 has more EQ available. I don't know if the sounds are really noticeably better, at least the ones I use.
The 50 had stereo chorus, which was discontinued in the later models, probably because it detuned the signal in the air of the room. I'm speculating about that ... does anybody know?

GC right now has a used 50 for $99. they're built like tanks, so I wouldn't worry about buying used. You will need a power supply for another $15 or so.

[sgosnell]

Boss pedals are buffered, whether they're on or off. I don't know about other brands. You can put any Boss first in the chain and always have a buffered chain.

[jazzgtrl4]

Heres my nano board all powered by Pedaltrain Volto..i get 4 hours easly wiht a charge.

[emanresu]

I would never leave the house without my fmr rnp used for guitar before anything else. All else is optional.

[marcwhy]

Recent thread:
Best Jazz Pedals?