Routing magic!

weird guitar person

weird guitar person

Experienced
Built a lot of rigs over the years, imitating my heroes and heroines naively in the absence of the knowledge that we take for granted online these days.

Kind of a shame, as I was 90% of the way there on many of the rigs I put together. Some of the features in my nineties era multi-effect rack units make perfect sense now that I know what came before.

Recently I’ve been super stoked about 80’s session players’ rigs for which schematics are readily available online. (Ironically, I think session players make good models for managing complexity and keeping things simple and reliable!)

Here’s an example routing that I’d not considered on my own that’s blown my mind…

Heavy feed-forward compression into eq to restore brightness, into tri-chorus, split into harmonizer stereo de-tune and stereo reverb in parallel, mixed together into dual delay units, with dry signal maintained all the way through.

Anyone else have favorite non-standard (by today’s standard common practice?) routings and or effect ordering tips they’re excited about? Hope so!

Cheers all, Daniel
 
Here’s another one from a fantastic interview Dan and Mick of That Pedal Show did with Johnny Marr. Johnny has his tech retrieve his “Smiths pedalboard” and he briefly shows it to the guys. Some irony that they didn’t discuss it at length, but hey, if Mr. Marr was showing me his original pedalboard, my jaw would be on the floor.

Digital delay before distortion sounds massive!!! Pedal compression last in the chain… I’d be curious what else stands out to folks. Fwiw, the corollary to my interest in revisiting post amp racks is what comes before the amp in what order.

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rockstarjazzcat said:
I think the contrast of delay first, compression last caught my eye. Common and yet not commonly encouraged? Any effects orderings that made you reconsider an ordering habit and perhaps ditch a limiting belief?
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Recently I discovered Gilmour at some point had a wah placed after all his overdrive/distortion pedals, I tried it the other day and it sounds quite interesting and more "modern" if you will
 
Depends on what you are going for. Delay after gain will have much more clarity. Out front it tends to get smeared by the gain and is far more compressed, so it usually requires lower mix settings to keep from walking all over the dry signal. Same goes for reverb in front of the amp.
 
mr_fender said:
Depends on what you are going for. Delay after gain will have much more clarity. Out front it tends to get smeared by the gain and is far more compressed, so it usually requires lower mix settings to keep from walking all over the dry signal. Same goes for reverb in front of the amp.
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Right, which is why I would have generally avoided the same, with a certain ideal in mind.

The DD-3 after the distortion can sound boring after trying in front. I observe two things off the bat…

1. After the distortion it’s a decaying exact copy of the moment a note distorts.
2. Decayed repeats interact differently with distortion with each repeat when in front of the distortion. The last repeats can sometimes actually be gentler this way.

Marr keeps a fairly wet mix and it’s his playing style that masks the “walking over” cited.

@mr_fender, do you have a favorite routing in the AxeFx that defies commonly taught “correct” routing?
 
I typically prefer delay after the amp for high gain sounds, but it depends. Sometimes the more grungy sound of it out front just sounds right, usually for shorter delays with not a lot of repeats. Long delays with lots of repeats tend to turn into mush pretty quickly out front.

For reverb, I often prefer the sound of spring reverb in front of the amp. It gives it more character and sounds more like surf guitar, but that's usually on cleaner or edge of breakup sounds.
 
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