I truly miss my 3leaf enabler and FEA compressors, but tell me about the others. What do you think about those? I love preamps and different preamps on one board. My personal favorite, of all the ones I've gone through, is my current Ken Smith P.A.P.A. Truly love the tone I get out of that pedal.
Sure thing, I just hope I don't ramble
. I run my signal from bass to
Southampton Fifth Gear
JohnK F2B
JohnK GK Rails
Meatsmoke
FEA DE-CL
Tuner
3leaf Enabler: with the line out to an amp (if needed) and the DI straight to the board. This gives me an amazing full amp sound right to the board, with a number of choices of tone based on what songs are picked (we do a very wide variety of music so it could be singer songwriter one week, rock the next, Gospel, heck even some hip-hop once).
The Fifth Gear is a boost that is also a little dirty, but really adds some...growl and girth to the notes.
The JohnK F2B is based on the Alembic preamp, and can be used as a tone shaper or boost, and fattens things up nicely.
The GK Rails is based on the power section of the GK RB amps to give you that grind (thread here,
GK rails in a pedal?).
The Meatsmoke gives me the full tube amp tone in a pedal (although arguably almost as big as a small amp). It is absolutely amazing, and sounded so good that even when I'm using my amp, I bypass the preamp on my Ampeg PF500 and just go straight into the Power amp in. With the two channels I can go from completely clean up to overdriven on the first channel and pick up from there all the way up to a wild fuzz sound with the boost channel.
What I like to do is set the Meatsmoke to get a touch of break up when I dig in, and I use the F2B to shape the sound a little and put the volume just above unity so it pushes the tubes in the Meatsmoke a little more. I also use the Fifth Gear the same way. The Fifth Gear really just adds something special to my sound.
If I need to clean up some, I will cut out the FG and like wise if I need to get fuzzy I can hit the boost on the Meatsmoke. I like to use the Rails pedal to add some dirt under energetic parts just to fill things out some (it has a boost in it too and I like to set it for a nice breakup and then use the boost to bring it back to unity). The Rails is a unique effect and I am still finding its niche.
I have it set up so my big board of effects patches in right after the Fifth Gear (it really sounds amazing pushing anything), and then goes right into the F2B so I have all my preamps at the end (and I've found the Rails sounds good adding dirt after other effects).
I hope that wasn't too much, but I absolutely love this board. This is my bare minimum set up and was designed specifically to bring to my church where we go straight to the board and use monitors without amps on stage.
