I recently acquired a Rickenbacker 4003, and have been playing around with the stereo output. I got a Saturnworks 2 channel mixer to blend the signal back together after running parallel effects, and I've been really pleased with what I can do with it. I picked up an ABY box so I can use this with my other basses and my Telecaster that all have only mono output. The effect chain looks like this:
Top chain: EHX Tone Corset -> BAT Son of Pharaoh -> Behringer NR300
Bottom chain: Korg Pitchblack X -> Way Huge Pork & PIckle -> MAS Effects The Expanse
Each of these then goes into the Saturnworks mixer, and the combined mono output goes through the Broughton Low + High Pass Filter and then the SansAmp Para Driver DI. On the 4003 I send the neck (bass) pickup through the top chain and the bridge (treble) pickup through the bottom.
Some benefits i have noticed: I can turn on the Pharaoh and the Expanse (a spacey tremolo/reverb/delay pedal, tons of fun to play with) and have a blend of thick fuzz and clean, jangly psychedelic space rock sound. Or I can run the P&P into the Expanse and get some neat modulation on the overdriven tone with some smooth clean tone mixed in. If I want to get really thick and nasty, I can run the Pharaoh and the P&P in parallel - the Pharaoh is set up to have a growly low-end distortion, perfect for a doom/stoner metal sound, while the P&P is set to Overdrive mode and has a much brighter crunch. They sound great individually but combined they make a brutal wall of sound.
But here's the best part. That Behringer noise reducer? It's totally unnecessary now. On my old single chain setup I sometimes ran the P&P into the Pharaoh, or vice versa, to overdrive the fuzz or fuzz the overdrive. That was a brutal wall of noise too, but not all good noise. The gain was so high it hummed like crazy and I got the noise reducer to cut it out in between notes. It worked as well as any noise gate does, which is to say that the hum was still there while I was playing underneath the good stuff. I tried fiddling with knobs on the pedals, fiddling with volume from the instrument, shielding control cavities, moving to a different room - and these helped a little, but I couldn't get the sound I wanted. Running them parallel rather than in series turned out to be the fix I was looking for. They still make a lot of noise together, but it's better defined and crisp now in a way I just couldn't achieve before.
So I'll be taking the noise gate off the board for now, possibly replacing it with something else. Reverb? Octave? Phaser? Chorus? I'm open to suggestions. The pedals can move around as well, though I do want to keep the two dirt pedals in separate chains. I have some space on the bottom as well since the ABY doesn't actually live on the board, I just put it there for the photo.
Top chain: EHX Tone Corset -> BAT Son of Pharaoh -> Behringer NR300
Bottom chain: Korg Pitchblack X -> Way Huge Pork & PIckle -> MAS Effects The Expanse
Each of these then goes into the Saturnworks mixer, and the combined mono output goes through the Broughton Low + High Pass Filter and then the SansAmp Para Driver DI. On the 4003 I send the neck (bass) pickup through the top chain and the bridge (treble) pickup through the bottom.
Some benefits i have noticed: I can turn on the Pharaoh and the Expanse (a spacey tremolo/reverb/delay pedal, tons of fun to play with) and have a blend of thick fuzz and clean, jangly psychedelic space rock sound. Or I can run the P&P into the Expanse and get some neat modulation on the overdriven tone with some smooth clean tone mixed in. If I want to get really thick and nasty, I can run the Pharaoh and the P&P in parallel - the Pharaoh is set up to have a growly low-end distortion, perfect for a doom/stoner metal sound, while the P&P is set to Overdrive mode and has a much brighter crunch. They sound great individually but combined they make a brutal wall of sound.
But here's the best part. That Behringer noise reducer? It's totally unnecessary now. On my old single chain setup I sometimes ran the P&P into the Pharaoh, or vice versa, to overdrive the fuzz or fuzz the overdrive. That was a brutal wall of noise too, but not all good noise. The gain was so high it hummed like crazy and I got the noise reducer to cut it out in between notes. It worked as well as any noise gate does, which is to say that the hum was still there while I was playing underneath the good stuff. I tried fiddling with knobs on the pedals, fiddling with volume from the instrument, shielding control cavities, moving to a different room - and these helped a little, but I couldn't get the sound I wanted. Running them parallel rather than in series turned out to be the fix I was looking for. They still make a lot of noise together, but it's better defined and crisp now in a way I just couldn't achieve before.
So I'll be taking the noise gate off the board for now, possibly replacing it with something else. Reverb? Octave? Phaser? Chorus? I'm open to suggestions. The pedals can move around as well, though I do want to keep the two dirt pedals in separate chains. I have some space on the bottom as well since the ABY doesn't actually live on the board, I just put it there for the photo.
