The Latest Floor Setup

My rig is always in flux; I’m always trying a new piece here or there. Over time my rig tends to spread, like kudzu, taking up more space on the floor and more time to set up and tear down.

Obviously that kind of thing can’t go on forever. Every once in a while I look down at my feet and see what looks like a pile of colorful little boxes surrounded by a million snaky cables, and I decide that things are getting way too complicated. So I go in the other direction, consolidating the rig down to a few select pieces. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days, and you can see the results in the picture.

I always start the consolidation with the one truly essential piece for me: a Digitech RP loaded with my latest patch set. In my latest setup, the one shown in the picture, the RP is an RP500, my favorite performance platform. At the start of the signal chain is an Audix Fireball V mic, which goes to a direct box for connection to a Digitech iStomp. I’ll probably drop the direct box from the chain soon, but in the meantime I need it to make it easier to connect the mic to the iStomp. The next piece in the chain is the RP500, followed by the JamMan Stereo looper, whose output goes to a Peavey KB2 keyboard amp (or, in live performance, to the PA).

While I was setting up and testing this rig, I loaded the iStomp with Digitech’s Bad Robot filter effect. The cool thing about the iStomp is that it can take on a lot of different characters, and I’m having fun working through them one by one. I found that Bad Robot sounds very good when it’s feeding a clean sound on the RP500, with or without effects like chorus and detune. I made a few recordings of same, and I’ll add them to this post soon. Stay tuned.