9 March 2010

Zoom Zoom Zoom!

Today's post is dedicated to my Zoom G2.1u pedal I spent over an hour configuring.

I got this pedal after my old zoom died during the recording of Shackled's debut album "A Pint of Heavy" and for a while I was playing it with a crappy sound.

When I could bare it no more I RTFM and played with the settings and managed to come up with a bank of fairly decent sounds, however when I tried to turn down the compression, boost, mic'd cab sound modeller, FX, Delay and Reverb I couldn't find a way to turn them off.....so I turned them to their lowest value (except the cab modeller, the only alternative was to turn on the Extra EQ but that makes my guitar sound like I'm playing it by slapping my bawbag off it.) I ended up with a sound that's ok for direct injection (when I practice at home with headphones plugged into the pedal or when I run it directly into Pro Tools) but a sound that doesn't carry in a live mix.

So irritated by my live sound I went back to the drawing board and in the process discovered that the left footswitch acts as OFF button for any effects. (Must not have RTFM'd as thoroughly as I should have.) So now I have a bank of sounds dedicated to not having anything but an amp modeler on it (with simple effects like reverb/wah added to each one.)

I used bank D for "Defenestrators" (bank C is going to be the Shackled bank with D0 being clean, C9 being METAL AS FUCK and C8 being Hero of the Day. D1 is Crunchy Punk sound, D2 is Crunchy Punk sound with reverb (or Crunchy Punk solo) D3 is Crunchy Punk with flange (cause I love a bit of flange!) D4 is a copy of D1 (for easy flicking between effects) and D5 is Porno Wah (wah with reverb). As I need more effects I'll fill in the extra banks. Think C7 will be Stripped....