Two or three years ago I took in a box full of pedals to my local GC to trade. I don’t guess it was quite a box full, but it was 7 or 8. It was by and large a bunch of Klones and TS-type that I had never used after I tried them out the first time. I ended up trading them straight up for a Line 6 Pod Go.
Prior to the Pod Go, I had two multi-effect pedals. I had a Vox Tone Lab ST and a Fender Mustang Floor. Both of them still worked well for what I wanted, but I wanted to try something that wasn’t 10+ years old. The Tone Lab was based on the same tech that was in the Valevetronix amp I had bought in like 2008, and that Fender Mustang line that included the Floor had come out in 2010 (I think). So the tech in the new one was like 12 years old, and the tech in the other was 14 or 15. I figured that guitar gear had moved forward a LOT in that amount of time, so I wanted to see what was new. I think the Pod Go had come out in 2020, so the tech was only a couple years old when I got it.
Way back when, I had one of the Digitech RP50 pedals. I never was a big fan of it. Then, at some point, I had bought one of the Line 6 Mini Pods. You know the one. Not the big, red, bean-shaped one. It was the little one that was the same thing. I actually liked it. I just never found the right place to use it, so I eventually got rid of it.
Neeways, I knew somebody that gigged with one of the HX series, and I knew someone else that played a Helix at church every week. And both seemed happy with what and how they did. So, not needing the super robust Helix or really needing the HX, I went looking for the Pod Go. Trading the pedals for it seemed like a no-brainer for it.
Since I’ve gotten it, I have also gotten several IRs and presets for it. But, as I was sitting here playing it a few minutes ago, I realized that the couple that I use the most are ones that I’ve made. They’re also really similar to the actual pedal board I use most often. Tuner > TS-type > klone > vibe > reverb. And, on the Pod Go, I have them run into a Dumble amp emulation. The difference in that and my actual board is that the actual board has a delay on it, and I could never rationalize mortgaging the house to buy a real Dumble.
Now, I’ve made a bunch of presets. Looking through the list of them, I have one made specifically for my Les Paul, one specifically for my Tele, one specifically for my 339, etc. Then I have one that is made specifically for practice (it has the looper in it). Then I have one that is based on the AC30 model and another based on the JCM model and different amps like that. All total, I probably have 20 or so presets that I have made. Weirdly, or maybe not weirdly, most of them are really similar. The differences generally seem to be pretty small. For instance, the LP preset uses a klone and a TS-type where the Tele uses a klone and a Timmy-clone. Although, I have a couple that have the Prince of Tone with the SD-1 or Rat copies in them.
And even with those small differences, and having the different presets for each guitar, I typically end up using one of a couple of the presets. There’s the practice-room preset. I use that one a LOT. In fact, even if I’m not using it in my little practice room, I tend to fall on that one. I’ve actually got two versions of it. One has the looper, and the other has the 10-band EQ instead of the looper. Outside of that, it’s exactly what I describe a couple of paragraphs up. Doesn’t matter what guitar I’m using, that seems to be the one I grab. Even though I have a preset a couple of banks away that says “TeleTimKVRDum” I grab the one that says “PR no loop.”
I think I mentioned further up that the signal chain in that seems to follow my big boards. On the smaller one I use a bunch, it’s a tuner into a Lovepedal Kalamazoo or TS-9 (it seems like I’m swapping back and forth between those two pretty regularly) into a Wampler Germanium Tumnus (klone) into a Keely Verb o’ Trem. My bigger board (that gets used less than the smaller one) is an MXR Uni-Vibe into a Visual Sound Open Road (ODR clone) or Visual Sound Route 808 (TS-type) (I seem to swap these two pretty often too) into a KTR (depending on your perspective it’s a Klone made by Klon) into a Wampler The Doctor delay into a Boss TR-2 into a reverb. I have a reverb on both because my amp doesn’t have one. The key differences being the vibe and the delay in the bigger board.
Funny how we tend to do that. I guess there’s truth in the fact that we each have a “sound” in our head, and that’s kind of what we migrate to when we set our rig up. That seems to be what I have done with my actual boards. And it’s what I seem to have done with the Pod Go.
In fact, several years ago, I ended up laughing about that. I had sat down with that Tone Lab to setup some different tones. I spent several hours one Saturday afternoon setting up a couple of Vox models and a couple of Marshall models and Fender Twin models and Bassman models. I wanted to be able to easily switch between each of the amp sounds because they all sound pretty different. A couple days later, I sat down to go back and play through several of the models I had setup just so I could hear and compare them. When I did, I realized that, although they did sound a little different, by and large, I had dialed them all in pretty close to each other. The AC30 sounded kind of like the JCM sounded kind of like the Twin sounded kind of like all the others.
Which reminds me of a video I saw way back in the early days of the tube of you. It was probably 2006 or 2007. I’ve looked for it several times the last 10 years and been unsuccessful in finding it. Apparently, at some point, SRV and Brian Setzer played a show together. The vid was a point in the show where they were both on stage and swapped rigs. They unstrapped and gave the other their guitar, and they spent 5 or so minutes just swapping licks and having a good time. The thing that stood out to me was that SRV still sounded like SRV playing through a Gretsch and Setzer’s rig, and Setzer still sounded like Setzer playing through a Strat and SRV’s rig.
I’m not going to start a “tone is in the hands” debate because I think that’s right, and I think that’s wrong. But it struck me that day how it didn’t seem like the rig mattered.
That sound in each of our heads is what we want to hear, and no matter what gear we have, we’re going to end up as close to that sound as we can get. Funny how it seems to work out that way.