First gig with the FX8

hippietim

hippietim

Axe-Master
Some former bandmates of mine have a new project and asked me to come play with them at a benefit show today. My FX8 arrived on Friday and I had enough time to play around with it. I had tested it with a Tech 21 British Character pedal, Boss GP-10, and Amplifire into a Tech 21 Power Engine. I decided to go with the Tech 21 British pedal since it sounded very good and was the simplest unit to deal with. The results today were kick ass. I got complimented on my sound by several musicians. The FX8 worked perfectly. I set the British pedal so it had a bit of crunch and I could roll back my guitar volume to about 8 for a clean tone.

I only used one patch on the FX8 and no scenes. I basically tweaked A1. I whacked the compressor at the start of the chain and added a filter block at the end for a volume boost. I adjusted some levels and delay/reverb mix levels. I changed the phaser to a vibe and put it at the start of the chain (I hate vibes/phasers after distortion). So I used 7 of 8 stomps - vibe, X/Y drives, flanger, rotary, X/Y delay, reverb, and the filter block. The drive blocks worked great. I love that the drive blocks have so much more versatility with gain and EQ than traditional drives - no need for EQ after the fact. The rotary sounded great at whatever settings were in the factory preset. It was simple to adjust the placement of the loop and I never had to touch any level controls or deal with any of the normal balancing acts you would have with other multi-fx units. Whatever smart gain staging stuff Cliff came up with just worked right out of the box.

My signal chain was Crybaby > FX8 guitar in > FX8 send > British pedal > FX8 return > Power Engine.



 
I did something similar with a British pedal and an EHX Magnum 44 pedal, and it sounded fine too.
Great backup rig too.
 
i'm guessing that you could do the same thing with a tech 21 flyrig (instead of the british pedal) and have the same results, right?
 
is there a reason why you are using an external wah pedal rather than using the wah block with an expression pedal?
 
where did you put the british pedal in your signal chain? i'm guessing in between the rotary and right before the delay?
 
jb70 said:
is there a reason why you are using an external wah pedal rather than using the wah block with an expression pedal?
Click to expand...

Yeah. I got the FX8 on Friday and did a bunch of testing with it with various amp sims in the loop. Saturday I was completely booked other than about an hour where I had to learn a half dozen tunes. Sunday I had about an hour to put together a rig for the gig - some of that time was spent trying to decide between the Amplifire and the British pedal and some was spent dialing in the preset the way I wanted - that left about 6 minutes to put together a pedalboard and it would have taken me longer than that to find my spring loaded expression pedal.

Plus, I really like that wah.
 
jb70 said:
where did you put the british pedal in your signal chain? i'm guessing in between the rotary and right before the delay?
Click to expand...

The chain was:

phaser (vibe) > drive > tremolo > loop (British) > flanger > rotary > delay > reverb > filter
 
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