creepingnet's Music Gear Setup

When most people see my equipboard, they must think I'm some weird bastard offspring of Nirvana, The Cars, and Loverboy - most espeically Nirvana with the offsets and THIS thing on my board, but make no mistake, while I do pay probably too much homage to my musical heroes on the gear side, and while certain sounds draw me to different products at times - THIS is something different.........

About nine years ago, in another band, I went through a bit of a quest for my perfect chorus - and Chorus is one of the most original elements of my sound. The way I prefer to use it, and how I mix it in with more modern sounds. Basically put, I like a good Chorus pedal that's "out front" enough to be noticed if you pay attention, but not so "out front" that it overbears the sound too much - I want it to be an element of my sound that adds some complexity and depth/3-D elements to my sound. I'm extremely particular about this, and so far, the best chorus units I've used in my home studio were that on the BOSS ME-6 Multi Effects pedal, and that on the Behringer V-Amp Pro, but unfortunatley, I had yet - until very recently, not been able to find something I was 100% happy with.

Thus far, prior, I've owned a Starcaster Chorus (really bad), a EHX Stereo PolyChorus (yep, another Cobain pedal, liked the sound but it was not exactly what I wanted), and had toyed with just buying a BOSS ME-6 and A/Bing it with my regular pedals just for the chorus, plate reverb, and delay alone....

Then one day I'm at Guitar Center and they have THIS badboy in the shop for $75 used. I was a bit reluctant at first because between a Jag-Stang, Jaguar, and several HSS Strats, my rig was starting to look like a attempt at a budget Nirvana cover band setup. So I try it out, and well......it had THAT sound I was looking for - no, not that knob-wall the way up chorus warble everyone likes to imitate "Come AS you Are" with - and sure enough it has that......but it had that 3D, spatial, expanding, barely noticeable unless it's not there sound that makes my guitar sound huge and "in yo face" - Basically, I took the EHX SmallClone, and did exactly the OPPOSITE of what Kurt Cobain did and got my intended result. Now how's that a twist....

The EHX SmallClone is a one-knob wonder, and most of the time I just leave the rate knob at 0 and use the depth switch to switch between a slow, wavering chorus that sounds like a tank full of water during a light richter scale earthquake, and then a very light, smudgy, whoosh witth the Depth switch off that gives some extra treble, clarity, depth, and some background movement that makes my guitar sound very 3-D. If I do get the whim to do something more warbly, it's there, and i have used it as a vibrato before with the Depth switch off and the knob up as well. It has become my favorite mono chorus of all time.

So this story starts while I was in Zombie Jihad. I bought this thing off the other guitarist for $50.00 when he basically wanted us all to have the same tuner - and me, for over 20 years, had used my own ears to tune my guitar, and it always worked great, never a tuning issue in any of the previous bands....but this one, we relied on BOSS TU-2s for everything.

So I wound up adding it to my board for $50 and it's been well worth it and become a handy tool for intonating my guitars. I usually just keep it in the chromatic mode because not everything I use is in EADGBE - as I use Drop-D, Drop CG, Ricky Wilson (B-52's) tunings, and tune a Bass VI and regular basses and build/setup my own and friend's guitars and do the intonation with this as well.

My only problem is I've found with my big clodhopper feet is I can have a tendency to knock it into the wrong mode when playing live if I get a bit uh.....wild on stage. It's happened a few times, currently I'm not as reliant on it because most bands I use my ears to so I can compensate a few strings for specific songs using my ears and my touch. Something a lot of guitarists don't realize is a guitar is not a perfect instrument and no guitar is 100% perfectly in tune, you have flat and sharp spots all over the fingerboard - unless you buy one of those $500 compensated fretboards - even an Earvana Nut or Buzz Feiten system won't give you 100% accuracy on a guitar as the nature of it's design lends to sharp/flat notes. Also, like all BOSS pedals, it has a Buffer in it so it comes AFTER my custom-built FazzFuzz prototype pedal on my board to prevent dynamics/input issues.

So yeah, handy tool, just remember it does not fix the limitations of guitars and always put a Fuzz BEFORE it or you might have some problems with the behavior of your fuzz devices.

One of the most difficult parts of assembling my rig was finding the right Flanger. I had a very particular kind of Flanger sound in mind, sort of that low-end "woof woof" thing that Paul Dean had on the early Loverboy records. I wanted to adopt that sound for my own use as I had several nifty applications for it (but with my own tone). By the end of 2016, I'd tried darn near everything, a Modded DOD Flanger I tweaked the LFO sweep on, I'd found that sound on the Behringer V-Amp Pro's built in Flanger but it was VERY tricky to dial-in, and it seemed everything that had it was either expensive or did not work - even an old broken MXR DelayLine Flanger that got close but was totally unusable because of a very rare, out-of-production I/C on the board that I could not buy anymore to fix it.

So when my DOD FX-75B died, I decided to go on a nice little "Flanger quest" and it just so happened about that time a fellow I met through my youtube channel was asking me what I used to get that Flanger sound on the Loverboy covers I'd posted (using a Behringer V-Amp Pro) and said he had talked to Paul Dean in person and found out he had used a "Loft 450G DelayLine Flanger" (not far from that MXR unit I trashed a long time back because it was pretty much trashed). So I looked those up and they are like $500.00 - so well...crap, what am I to do?

I decided to go look at cheap Flangers on E-bay and look up demos of them, by the time I was done, I had a line on 3 different flangers, some strange old Arion-like unit that was located in Japan but had that sound by default, some obscure cheapo plastic Flanger that had the same sound, and then this, the Digitech TurboFlange.. the lower left-hand setting has it.

But what's nice about this Flanger is it has THAT sound, plus my old flanger sounds, plus a few new ones where the shift only goes up or only goes down, making it a non-one-trick-pony - while yes, the majority of the devices on my pedalboard were picked because I knew XX played on in XX band back in 19XX and got XX sound from them - another KEY element is that I actually have a reason to USE the knobs and switches on the pedal, get my money's worth out of it.

Unlike it's 2 competitors in the lineup, this one had a metal body (I HATE plastic pedals, I kill Behringers like cockroaches for example), it had the ability to go stereo if I wish, it has more than one operating mode, one of which is that low-swoop jet-flange thing Loverboy used, and it works with a standard power supply (unlike my old DOD pedals which needed an Atari 2600 style 9 volt adapter to be powered - ie 1/8" Mono Phono Plug vs. the current Barrel Jacks BOSS pedals use).

Currently I use this in a 90's cover band that does some 2000's covers too, and I found that mode 7 "Loverboy" setting works GREAT for covering Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name Of" on the intro, sounds bloody HUGE.

What more can I say, it has the sound I want plus a bunch of new ones, it's durable, it's quiet, I've had little trouble with it in the eight months I've been using it, and it's become my favorite flanger.

Ah, Behringer, best known for their plastic effects devices that sound great but have the structural integrity of an overly moist birthday cake.

But not this one....

This one has a metal enclosure, it's built like a tank, and it's been a mainstay on my pedalboard since 2009. I bought it when my sister gave me $50.00 for X-mas and told me to buy something I want on Amazon with it - so I did - this was it.

What I was looking for in a phaser was that Van-Halen MXR Phase 90 sound, not too overbearing, just adds some background movement to the sound. Well, THIS gets that tone for 1/4 or less than what an EVH Dunlop MXR Phase 90 would cost, and it has a bit more to it.

The upsides of this unit is that it has a durable plastic casing, the switch adds further versitility to it, and the range of Phaser goes from that Van-Halen modulation thing like he does on his solos, all the way up to a nice, warbly, thick 1970's style phaser perfect for running a Rhoads Piano through for those late 70's sitcom sound moments. Also, I've had it for eight years and it has yet to fail - which is kind of shocking considering some elements of the design, how long and hard I've used it for, and how much I paid for it new.

The downsides to this Phaser is it does eat batteries quite a bit, also, everything INSIDE the box is an SMD device, including the potentiometer, which does not make for the best internal durability. Also, the footswitch got noisy for awhile. But other than that, this thing is a bloody STEAL for $35.00.