Tag: gear

Catharsis Rehearsal Gear

Catharsis rehearsed this weekend for the upcoming European shows. Here’s a quick rundown of the gear Jimmy and I used.

My gear:
laney gh100l

pedalboard

I used my Laney GH100L, a borrowed Marshal 1960 cabinet, and a small set of dirt pedals you’ve seen before. For the shows, I may remove the Polytune and use a Snark clip-on tuner instead. I’m trying to lighten my load as much as possible.

Jimmy’s gear:
5150-3

amptweaker

Jimmy used his 50 watt 5150-III head, his Marshal 1960 cabinet, and an Amptweaker TightRock straight into the effects loop return! This is a novel approach I hadn’t considered before, which relies on the amp having an effects loop. Since we’re borrowing amps at these (and probably most future) shows, I’m a little skeptical. But this pedal sounds great in the instrument input or the loop.

The TightRock is a cool pedal with loads of unique features, including an effects loop that’s activated when the pedal is disengaged. You can use it to A/B between distortion sounds, for “only clean channel” effects, or to send a clean signal to a different amp (by not using the return). The distortion sounds great, and I’ll definitely have to look into getting one of these or the FatRock.

Small Peadlboard for Upcoming Catharsis Shows

Here’s the pedalboard I’m using for the upcoming Catharsis shows. It’s a Pedaltrain Nano sized IKEA Gorm shelf I made a few days ago. It’s small, lightweight, and minimal. All I need.

pedalboard-top

pedalboard-bottom

signal chain: TC Electronic Polytune Mini Noir -> modded Boss SD-1 -> custom Suhr Riot Reloaded clone, all powered by a Pedaltrain Volto underneath.

Custom Distortion Pedal

Matt from Atomium Amplification posted about a custom distortion pedal he’s building for me (along with the modded SD-1 from the previous post). Take a look:

custom distortion pedal

Basic volume/tone/gain setup with selectable symmetric/asymmetric clipping (really compression). The symmetric uses germanium 1N34As, the asymmetric uses a violet LED and 1N914s. Both sets use series resistors to make them act more like a compressor. Most of the actual clipping comes from overloading the 4580 opamp, which has no diodes in its feedback loop. The diode compressors give it more of a “touchy” vibe. It’s not a great design for low-gain, since it gets gainy really fast, but for high gain it’s got massive punch and manages to get both saturation and note separation.