Pedal Line Friday – 2/19 – Mike Mulholland

Today’s pedal line is from Mike Mulholland (@mikewtf). 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.

Hi, my name is Mike and I play guitar for a band called Emmure.  Catch us on the upcoming Mosh Lives II tour and this summer’s Vans Warped Tour on the Hurley stage. If you live in Australia, we’ll be out there with Machine Head and Hatebreed this coming spring, as well.

I’m a gear head and this is my pedal board.

Loop 4 – “Heat” – Tube screamer and two noise suppressors (Boss NS-2). I run this pretty much all the time as my main high gain tone on top of my lead channel. I found that two noise suppressors, directly in line, works really well and allows me to push the tube screamer hard without feeding back. For those wondering, it’s a custom, made by a guy named jason, whom I have since lost contact. It’s basically a Maxon OD-9 with a JRC4558D chip. I’ve had it a couple years, and it’s the best sounding overdrive i’ve had.

Loop 3 – “Soundwave” – This is the individual loop for the Boss Phase Shifter. It’s a great pedal but it is noisy as hell. I use it for a song called sound wave superior, hence the title.

Loop 2 – “Delay” – In this loop, I’m running my MXR Carbon Copy and Phase 90. I often use these two together, I recently swapped my Boss DD3 for the Carbon Copy, it’s so much warmer, I mostly use it to thicken up leads. The Phase 90 gives a little extra texture to everything, i keep it pretty low. Having them both running at the flip of one switch is nice.

Loop 1 – “Whammy” – Switches on my Whammy and Boss Super Shifter. I did have two Whammys directly in line, because we have songs where we octave up and octave down without enough time to bend over and turn the knob. I recently swapped out one of the Whammys for a Boss Super Shifter, because our octave down parts don’t require much expression, so instead of having to switch on, express down, express up and then switch off on a whammy, I use the tremolo arm function on the Super Shifter and just hold on it for as long as I need to dump down an octave. As soon as my foot is off it, i’m back to normal. I have found though, that the tracking on the whammy is slightly better for the low stuff. Harmonizer functions of both pedals are awesome.

The great thing about running a Voodoo Lab pedal switcher is that you have to put much less thought into the configuration of your pedals, since whatever effects you have activated are the only ones in line to the front end of your amp. If you want to get really wild, the pedal switcher is MIDI programmable and you can link one or more of them up to a Voodoo Labs pedal commander, and have each button control any configurations of pedals you’d like, similar to the GCX/Ground Control, except you can leave all of your pedals on the floor. I’m trying to keep it simple, and I tend to tweak my pedals quite a bit on stage. This is also much more portable than a GCX for me, because when I head overseas I don’t have to dismantle my whole rack setup.

All my pedals are stock and I’m running George Ls and a few monster rock patch cables, and I’m using the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2+. My board is a pedal train pro, it’s got a bracket on the bottom to bolt in the Voodoo PP2+, but leaving it on top makes it easy for myself or my tech to find a problem and fix it (sometimes things get a little hectic on stage, kids have used my pedalboard as a diving board on way more than one occasion). I’ve left the extra real estate on the right to accommodate my wireless unit (sennheiser) for overseas and one off shows, when we haven’t got access to our main rigs and are using rented or borrowed/shared back lines.

If you’re curious, my live rig consists of a Peavey 5150 II, through a pair of Mesa/Boogie flat front cabinets. I’m running an additional EQ and noise gate through the loop on my heads. I play fender telecasters with EMG pickups (81/60).

Some of my pedals that are not pictured here and not included in my live rig, but sometimes make special appearances:

*Radial BigShot
Boss RC-20
Boss GE-7 (2)
Boss DD-20 Delay
Boss DD-3 Delay
Boss CH-1 Super Chorus
MXR Wylde OD
Dunlop Cry Baby
Dunlop 535Q
EH Big Muff*
*Decimator G String*

Thanks for looking! Now follow me on twitter for the occasional bit of gear nerdery and tour insanity.

Mike Mulholland
Emmure
twitter.com/mikewtf
www.myspace.com/emmure