Pedal Line Friday – 8/12 – Daniel Cross

Today’s pedal line is from Daniel Cross. If you have a pedal line (doesn’t have to be in a board) for your rig, please email me a photo, bio, description of pedals and routing to pedalline@nulleffectsbay.com. Every Friday I’ll showcase a pedal line submission. Make sure you include any links to your band or music page.

Here’s my submission for the Pedal Line Friday page – as with most pedal boards, this is a work in progress (which feels like it’ll never be finished.) I play guitar with a noisy murk-rock band called Colonics and bass with an experimental drone band called Kellar. The same set up is used for both bands.

Starting at bottom right:

Korg Pitch Black tuner – it does everything it needs to and has really cool Knight Rider-like lights. Can’t ask for much more than that.

Here the chain splits into the beautiful red sparkly box at top right…

Sonic Pharmacy ‘Moon Patrol’ Wormhole FX/Feedback looper – bespoke FX/Feedback looper from The Sonic Pharmacy – this features a light sensitive controller that can be used like a wah to intensify the effect. Quite simply, this thing can break holes in your sound and send you through the wormhole. This is a one of a kind prototype that I really just can’t live without!

The looper holds the following:

Sonic Pharmacy ‘Ernest Borgnine’ Silicon Fuzz – bespoke pedal made for me by The Sonic Pharmacy. Pure dirt: simple, nasty fuzz.

Attached to this is a Sonic Pharmacy ‘Crumble’ pedal (under the power brick), that allows me to vary the voltage running into the Borgnine, to give me some nice varied tones that otherwise wouldn’t happen

MXR Blue Box – when 300lbs of silicon fuzz isn’t enough, you need something that’s going to put your speaker cones to the test.

Boss DS-1 Distortion – Absolute standard distortion, lovely crunch.

Boss OD-2 Turbo Overdrive – This really helps out with the volume drop of the Blue Box. And pushes it to another level.

Boss BF-2 Flanger – nice, simple analog flanger.

Biyang Baby Boom Time Machine – a really nice, cheap little semi-analog delay pedal that works better as an instrument than for delay! Dial the repeat (or ‘repead’ as the pedal actually says!) all the way up, the time all the way down and you get a really cool theremin-like sound. A bit of gentle tweaking on either of these controls will give you really, really interesting noises.

Beta Aivin DD2 Digital Delay – another cheap delay pedal that’s basically holding the fort until I can get something with a bit more range to it – expect this to disappear very soon.

I normally run this through a Fender Frontman 212R, which is about as big and loud a combo as I can afford right now. There’s a few other pedals that switch in and out of the board occasionally, a Boss Compressor/Sustainer and a Morley PWA wah that has been with me since the day I started playing – it’s made a comeback recently, but I couldn’t fit in the picture! I’ve got more on the way from The Sonic Pharmacy, who have been absolutely essential in helping me get this set-up to where it is now.

Here’s hoping my humble line makes it onto the site. Keep up the good work!

Thanks,
Dan Cross.