So yesterday was New Gear Day. For any musicians reading, you know how exciting it is when the delivery guy shows up at your door with a bunch of new goodies for you to tinker with. For me, it was more exciting than Christmas.
Mr Delivery Man brought me a bunch of new patch cables courtesy of Ernie Ball, a couple of interesting "Z" shaped patch cables courtesy of Donner as well as a couple of new 15ft stage cables courtesy of Fender. The Ernie Ball patch cables were pancake-ended as they take up less space on my pedal board, which is vital real estate given how many stomp boxes are currently on there (11). At the moment i am using one of the small Pedal Train Metro boards as i downsized my stomp box collection to a number of micro pedals, predominantly Mooer, as well as keeping a couple of trusty Boss pedals, notably the DD-5 digital delay, the DS-1 Distortion pedal and, of course, the Chromatic Tuner. I am personally of the opinion that Boss pedals, cockroaches and Keith Richards will be the sole survivors of any nuclear blast that takes place...
Out of the box, i was mostly intrigued by the "Z" shaped patch cables to start with. I had never seen, let alone tried, this type of cable before. I decided that when i had multiple Mooer pedals in a row, the Z cables would get used. Elsewhere i would use the pancake-ended patch cables i also bought, keeping a few MXR patch cables i purchased last November as spares in case i should ever need them.
It took at least 3 hours on-and-off to find a suitable way to arrange the pedal board so that every pedal was accessible. The main reason i believe i was having so much trouble is that i have recently added a noise gate to my board to alleviate some of that God awful hum that pickups can generate, particularly single coils, when on a dirty or overdriven channel. After much returning to the drawing board, the task was successful, at least in the sense that i had found a way to situate them all on the pedal board comfortably and had connected up the patch cables. Next up was trying to wire them up to the power supplies that i have hidden under the pedal board itself. I have two Mooer Micro Power supplies powering my effects, one on each side of the board. The wiring itself was tricky due to the limited space that i had left myself for wiring purposes. Fortunately the power cables have one straight end and one angled end on them so, after some fiddling about and much cursing, the board was up and running.
This afternoon, after restringing a couple of electric guitars for a recording session tomorrow, i managed to plug it in and hear it for the first time. It sounded lush. The cables that were used on the board before yesterday were old and not of the best quality, meaning that the sound itself was not as true as it could have been. However, once the switch had been made, the guitars sounded more realistic and more like a direct signal from guitar to amp, with minimal diminishment in tonal quality , whereas beforehand the sound itself was crackling and slightly less full than it should have been, despite running through such a large signal chain.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, tomorrow i have a full day recording session for Monica Davis & the Black Spines over at Summerhouse Studios in Ealing, so the new cables and pedal board will be getting and full and thorough test tomorrow as we work our way through a large amount of material. I am incredibly excited to see how well they get put through their paces. I will report back after the session is over and done with.
Until next time.
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