Help me plan my pedal board

I highly doubt that setting 2 pitch shifters to cancel eachother out will be transparent, but in times past it wouldn't even track correctly, these days the technology is so well developed that it just might....

my limited experience pitch shifting bass way up within a DAW is that it generates some really strange harmonics as you go over the octave, especially if you are playing further up the neck... but you can definitely do it if you want your bass to sound like some kinda extraterrestrial stringed instrument (which is pretty much what I was shooting for at the time)

At first, I would have only bought a Digitech Bass Whammy JUST so I can do some Tool songs occasionally. I never liked it's abilities and tones. The Ricochet however sounds amazing in the demos so far. I think the Ricochet has less options than the bass whammy but it it didnt, I would likely ditch the bass whammy. I'm usually a set it and forget it player, which is why I went with rack gear for so long. It wasn't until I got a taste for playing live that I realized I could use on-the-fly changing options.

I'm really set and forget too, I want amps with minimal options and to have anything at my feet preset based so I can focus on playing... the only things I fiddle with while playing consistently are my guitar controls and mainly then its the pickup selector and maybe a volume knob

I don't know how mesa guys deal with all the options, its overwhelming... I can get flustered trying to dial in 2 tone knobs and a presence control sometimes because every position sounds good to me once I'm driving the amp hard enough

y'know, the pedalboard you are building would probably kick ass going direct into a big, wide-bandwidth power amp, you could split the feed between the board and that power amp driving a nice full range speaker configuration to monitor yourself... the board has a lot of shaping options just on the fly rig

I think if I were going to play bass in a band again I would put together a bass board like yours and just slam it into one of these bad-boys:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=390917&gclid=CJyfkeyqh80CFUkkhgodNZ0GnQ&is=REG&ap=y&c3api=1876%2C92051678282%2C&Q=&A=details

maybe driving on of those mesa cabs with some 10" speakers and a 15" with a horn... either that or I would just run straight into one of those new TC toneprint rigs.... they seem awfully convenient and I tend to love everything TC puts out

EDIT:

bass is a weird instrument to amplify and to add effects to, because what you can get away with is very dependent on the genres you want to play since the bass has such a variable role in different types of music... in years past when I did bass gigs I would use an ashdown that belonged to my full time band or before that I would slave a Fender Bassman 50 with an Ampeg B25b... the ahsdown was easier to tote around, but harder to dial in, especially for a more vintage sound, whereas the ampeg/fender tube set-up was pretty versatile as long as I had big, efficient cabs to make up for the lower headroom... surprisingly, slaving 70s ampeg and fender heads together can really cover some modern tones.... I also used my early dual showman for a few bass gigs as well as Sunn and Univox all purpose 100 watt heads I owned for a bit, but the ampeg and fender really worked well together formost musical styles (the b25s are portaflexes with more output in a stand-alone head and the Bassman 50 & 100 are in my opinion Fenders first bass amps to flatter the instrument and not just be a guitar amp with extra thump... and I did rock gigs, an industrial band or two as well as plenty of jazz and country-tinged pick-up bands... if someone wanted to pay me or a friend needed favor because someone got sick I would load up the 'ol neon's trunk and back seat and fill in)

Amp wise I was thinking Hiwatt, like my current one, as I really like it

a big hiwatt won't be a lot like what you have.... might have a similar voicing at the 1st gain stage, but everything else about it will be different

you should play some DR models at the volume levels you expect to be playing at before deciding, they are not for everyone and certainly don't want to 'keep it down' for the neighbors or sound man at the local bar.

Also, the modern UK made Hiwatts are said to be kinda crappy by Hiwatt enthusiasts. They are plagued by reliability issues because though they mimic the old build quality, the comonents aren't up to snuff ine very batch. Also, the current owners of the brandname aren't paying royalties to the estate/famiy of Dave Reeves (who designed them and built the brand). If you must buy new, Hitone is the way to go. But vintage examples are built like tanks and shouldn't have any reliability issues. Literally Hiwatt made the most rugged vintage amp, period. Stay away from biacrown branded Hiwatts (80s), pretty much any model that says "Lead" on it is junk apart from the 80s 30 waters which are okay, though a little marshally. Generally youa re looking for a 70s 4 input amp in 50 or 100 watts depending on how much ridiculous headroom you need. Earlier years break up a little earlier, alter ones are super clean machines. At the end of the 70s they went to 2 inputs and a smidge more gain and those amps sound quite good. Also, the 90s UK 'made by Audio Brothers' amps are apparently very good too. You really can score a good 70s 4 input hiwatt for about the cost of a current reissue though. I see road worn examples with righteous tone for between 2 and 4,000 USD on the reg. Be prepared for the amp NOT TO OVERDRIVE ON TIS OWN unless its at stadium volumes. Also be aware that the master in all but the earliest Hiwatts cannot be sued to produce preamp overdrive. It wasn't designed to be like an 80s Marshall. The Master on a Hiwatt serves an entirely different function and ahs totally different implementation. If you want a 50 to 100 watt amp that's more Hifi than a Marshall but has more of its own natural overdrive look at vintage Vox AC50 and AC100 mk 4s, early sound city heads (L100 mk 1 and 2, 3 is ceaner and 4 is a totally different thing that's not for the uninitiated) and Orange Matamps or Orange Graphics. A lot of guys like the Orange overdrive heads of the era too, but I don't think they sound as good as the older ones without modification.

additionally, tubescreamers are a bit mid-heavy for the hiwatt voicing, though hiwatts play well with a ton of drives and distortions and generally take pedals of all sorts VERY well

What sort of amps do you reccomend? And what other drive pedals could I get over a TS808

I updated my previous post

my biggest advice is to scale the amp to fit the gigs you are playing AND to know your style and sound before dropping the big bucks on a high end amp.... if you need to experiment, do it in the cheap seats

you seem to have a very 'vintage' rig in mind overall so Ic an only assume you are looking to do classic rock, blues and maybe some alternative, but if that's not the case say so

the TS9 really mates with blackface fender amps and the MODERN non-blackface designs the best whereas brit amps (vox, hiwatt, orange, selmer and EL34 equipped Marshalls and some of the 50s American tweed designs) get on better with its cousins the Boss SD1 and BD2 (if you wanna stay in the TS camp and stick with tried and true, big-name stuff)

in really alternative OD circuits, the crowther hot cake is a fave with vox/hiwatt/orange guys though to be honest I have not tried one

to be clear, I wholeheartedly recommend Hiwatt if you want to play HELLA LOUD and you are willing to seek out a legit DR504 or DR103 on the vintage market

Yeah, I do sorta play like classic rock. So you reccomend the Hotcake with English Amps, and TS for others?

I'm just saying the hot cake has quite a following and is a very untraditional design

I recommend playing your amp at 10 like a man.

Thanks, for the tips, I've had a look at some amps, and I might go down to the shops and try some out

yeah, you won't know what you like if you don't play some... look for a shop with a no-questions asked 30 day return (or at least exchange) period so if you get it home, take it to a rehearsal and HATE it you can go swap it back

I looked up the amp you have, its essentially the same circuit as the Vox AC4TV with blonde tolex that was everywhere ebfore Vox brought out the top-boosted AC4C1 with a 10" and the handwired AC4HW with a 12" I have in my bedroom for practice... the word on the web is that Hiwatt deviated from that platform by adding some solid state componenets to get crunchier drive textures with the master volume turned down, but the place a 5 watt single-ended amp shines the most is in its wonderful power tube distortion with all those tasty even order harmonics! If you like the single-ended sound you could get a better rendition like the AC4HW1 or any number ofboutique takes on the venerable Fender Tweed Champ and related Supro designs. Many of them come in larger cabs or as a head. There's also the Laney Lionheart line that has larger models like a 20 watter and 50 watter that uses big EL34 power tubes in parallel single-ended (instead of the traditional push-pull) to produce a lot more volume but with the signature single-ended power amp distortion.... the enxt closest circuits to single-ended are cathode biased push-pull designs like the Tweed Deluxe, Marshall Studio 15, 18 watt and 20 watts, and of course the voc ac30, ac15 and ac10... and clones of all the aforementioned, they are 3 VERY popular amp formats. But seriously, 5 watts is pretty darned loud at 10. 50 watts is really not that much louder because power and sound pressure do not equate in a linear fashion.

If you don't nee a clean tone, a 5 watt single-ended amp will hang with a drummer if you play through a larger cab than you have like a 1x12, 2x12, 2x10 etc... use efficient speakers, at least 98dB sensitivity like a celestion greenback, 100dB plus will be better.... you will sound righteous thick classic rock sounds... famously, Clapton record Layla on a 50s Tweed Champ turned all the way up and fever since overdrive became fashionable its been common practice to turn up little amps to meltdown levels to achieve great tone in the studio or on small stages... there's a lot of big amp muscle you lose by going this route, but much of it is a 'feel' thing that may not be noticeable in the mix.... you gain (pun intended) thicker overdrive at manageable decibel levels, the ability to use your main amp to practice at home without the cops coming, and magical class A harmonics way out front in a way a big amp cannot deliver.... you also won't have any crossover distortion (which is generally held to be harsh and unmusical and is present to varying degrees in ALL push-pull circuits based on their class, bias and phase inverter design) because in a single-ended amp, 1 tube is responsible for amplifying both the positive and negative side of your signal

you may also wanna look into the THD Univalve and Bivalve amps if you are happy with the single ended sound but want a little bit more and the potential to play with louder, cleaner and/or bolder versions of that tone

you may also wish to consider mixing a 15 to 30 watt amp with your current 5 watter to get a blend of defined, muscley semi-dirty tones simultaneously with your pinned single-ended tone (Keith Richards ahs always favored tricks like this and often runs small Oahu amps in conjunction with his huge, 80 watt tweed twins to he has a 3D clean/dirty sound w/o effects apart from sometimes a little tube tape echo or phaser for the 80s stuff)

Cool, thanks for the tips, I have only played guitar for 2 years so all this is really helpful.

I could tell. And you don't seem to have an electronics background either.

here's some very basic info from a guy who knows how to lay it all out for people whoa re new to guitar amps:

https://reverb.com/news/daves-corner-amp-topologies-101-basic-low-gain-and-high-gain-preamp-circuits-explained?_aid=tank

https://reverb.com/news/daves-corner-basic-guitar-amplifier-output-stage-circuits-explained?_aid=tank

https://reverb.com/news/daves-corner-amplifier-power-supply-stages-explained

I also forgot to mention that most powerful tube amps sound lame played at 1 or 2 on the dial and master volume amps sound tinny if you turn the gain way up and run the master at 2, so that's why I say to scale the amps to fit the gig... if you have to turn your powerful amp way down it is probably not going to sound muscley and powerful anymore and the guy in the band getting on stage after you using a cranked small-to-medium amp very well may sound meaner

the exception to this rule is cathode biased amps which tend to sound hot and tasty even at 1, though they won't produce power tube distortion any sooner than a fixed bias amp of similar power and gain

Si Jimmy, what is my board missing you think? Something maybe for the active into low quality board issue?

nah, sans amp fly rig should handle that, its both a multi-effects and a DI isn't it?

YEP

the output from the sans amp can act as a pad and it has an XLR out, so you are set to drive a cheap Mackie or whatever you've been overloading with a balanced signal of correct voltage and impedance... it might not be as good as a DI with a dry thru jack if you want to send a padded DI signal and still drive your amplifier's input with a lot of voltage, but if you don't have any small signal tubes in your rig you're trying to bludgeon (or tubes you are trying NOT to bludgeon because you want a clean sound) its hardly important

EDIT:

generally when I am planning a rig or pretty much any signal chain for any purpose I am looking at impedance specs and nominal output in dbv 1st and foremost.... appropriately integrating gear with varying input and output impedances as well as stuff at instrument level, mic level, and different line levels like +2dbv and maybe some old -3dbv stuff really needs to be thought thru carefully to maintain your signal integrity, produce only desireable and musical distortion and avoid frequency loss or performance issues caused by sending a low impedance into a bipolar transistor biased to see a high impedance or driving a vacuum tube stage with a meg resistor setting it for instrument level with too low an impedance at +2dbv when its only designed to take maybe 1 volt peak-to-peak at froma higher impedance source so some of that signal is being resisted by the 1 megohm resistor

I learned a lot about this stuff when I got my 1st rack gear as a teenager (that's a story in and of itself) and tried incorporating it into my pedal and tube-amp based rig

but I digress.... a word on padding down active pickups.... did you know that bass amps with active inputs are providing you with a lower impedance in that also has a voltage pad before it hits the 1st stage of preamplification and gain control? gear with a switch for actives tends to just lower the 'sensitivity' by changing a couple resistors to achieve a similar effect, dropping voltage and loading the active electronics down with an impedance load closer to the system's output impedance

I know nothing of electricity/wiring. It doesn't stick with me when I try and it all goes over my head. People say to associated it all with water flowing in a river, but it still doesn't stick. I even made myself a cheat sheet and saved it in an e-mail for just gear with 4ohms and 8ohms. I wish I could learn it and have it stay with me though. I would love to be able to work on my own pedals and such. I have 3 pedals that I can't use because they need work done on their innards as well as a Fender Rumble 350 head that was in a car crash. I can't even solder. I fried my Spector Tone Pump JR when trying to just take it off. I suck.

Loudest rig I ever owned was a mismatched set though.

8ohm Crate GX-65 guitar 12' Combo

4ohm Crate 212 bass Cabinet

It shook the earth at just volume 3. I was in a recording studio in Austin and people in other sound reduction rooms could hear me in mine. I still have the 212 but it now has a loose cone or something vibrating around in it.

well, a dead match isn't needed for solid state, just don't go below the minimum impedance (and even then you might not break the box of transistors if tis well-designed, you obviously didn't blow that combo up), you are just losing wattage with each 100% mismatch upward, but as you were putting high into low you probably almost DOUBLED your wattage... plus, if that cab was an OLD crate 2x12 with Fane speakers or Pyle Drivers like they used in the 80s sometiems then the speakers were MASSIVELY efficient, at least 100dB of sensitivity, hell, even the eminence speakers they used back then were pretty loud

things ae deicidedly pickier in the tube world because of the output transfrmers and things are also more complicated as regards the effect ofimpedance on wattage...

but the other thing to realize is when you play games with impedance you can potentially effect frequency response and even introduce distortion you might not otherwise hear, and that goes from your instrument jack to speaker jack... every connection is designed for a certain set of impedance conditions, some will be very narrow in what they will tolerate while stll functioning as designed, other stuff will totally bug out if you screw around with mismatches (no top end, crazy oscilations, weird distortion), and some stuff will put up with a lot while still sounding pretty much as it was intended to with normal use... as a rule MOST guitar and bass gear is designed to be pretty tolerant, but gear designed for other purposes may not be designed to play well with guitar and bass stuff.... guitar and bass electronics are a holdover from an older standard of audio electronics, things changed a lot in the 60s as theory advanced in-step with the needs of broadcaster, recording engineers and the (then new) sound reinforcement professionals... but guitar technology stayed pretty much the same and because it took another decade for guitarists and bassists to worry about interfacing directly with gear not specifically designed for them, the 60s pretty much just saw the introduction of the DI as a Band-Aid o help us interface with all this new stuff... and Gibson/les paul tried low impedance pickups in the little-known les paul recording model (Les' favorite solidbody), but when alembic pioneered active systems they were worried about driving long cable runs on festival stages but focused on driving an instrument amplifier since no one relied on the PA back then

I digress

don't feel bad, it took me til I was in my 20s to really start to 'get' electronics, before that I was a decent musician who could solder as long as there was something obviously broken that I could SEE... it helped to make a bunch of records for other people and really spend a lot of time with all thosec crazy electrons... I wouldn't think of electricity as a river or a cable as a pipe and gear as a valve per se, but I ehar a lot of people use that analogy and I think its misleading and confusing.... you might want to find a basic book that's actually written for musicians, that helped me a lot as did looking at the history of electronics. Being a bit of an antiquarian, relating the evolution of electronics in the 20th century to the evolution and development of modern musical forms that employ all this technology really made it exciting and interesting for me VS just diving into text books right away. The right text books are a lot more engaging when you have soe historical sense to everything you're reading.

whats funny s that in the studio particularly, I often throw out the rule book and misuse gear, but I have an idea what results I will get before I start because I learned the 'rules'. My curiosity really got going when I would screw things up while making records and ask myself "now why did that happen?"

Just one last question, do you think a Tubescreamer would sound okay with a Hughes and Kettener amp?