Zed A. Shaw, Painter

The second annoyance is, while it is perfectly synced with the Beat Buddy, it has a super odd idea of when to start and stop recording, and how to stop and start. Let's say you record an 8 measure loop and want to do the 2nd one. Like, you do some chords and then want bass.

Your first track is fine, but now *you* have to coordinate starting the recording for track 2 on first part of the 8 measure block. If you accidentally start on the 3rd block then you either have to just keep playing or stop and undo it. I'd rather have it cue instead.

And when you end a phrase, it's rather brutal in how it cuts the recording. Again, I can handle it on my own but it'd be better if it did a nice job of fading and merging the ends instead of just a straight cut. But, this thing updates on its own like a dream so it's easily fix

The Plus Pedal is super duper nice: https://www.gamechangeraudio.com/pluspedal/  It's a sustain pedal but it's got a lot of other subtlety and quirks to it. With just that pedal I can make my guitar sound like organs, cellos, insane searing leads, droning sitars, and horrific synths.

The Ricochet is really good if you like the Whammy: https://www.digitech.com/whammy-pitch/RICOCHET-V-00.html … I used to use the Whammy since I play a BassVI so double octaves sound great, but the original Whammy is bigger than my whole board. The Ricochet sounds the same and you just click a foot switch.

Honestly the Ricochet's features is all that anyone uses on the Whammy anyway. You can enable it to act with momentary instead of toggle switching, and control the pitch rise and fall time, so it then acts just like the foot whammy but better controlled. It is a power hog tho.

I forgot to mention there's a Source Audio foot pedal off to the right: https://www.sourceaudio.net/reflex-expression-controller.html … It's discontinued now, but basically it's an insane wah pedal that does MIDI in and out plus 3 expression outs. If you need to wah a ton of gear, this is the best.

But, most MIDI pedals like the MIDI Maestro and the Morningstar MC6 can take two expression pedals in and then do the MIDI translate for you, so it's kind irrelevant these days. Also I think the only people who use source audio gear are mathy fusion jazz bass players.

Finally that little Ep Booster is just a very nice very transparent very small very clean boost pedal, which you usually need if you're running a guitar through a ton of gear, and especially if you're doing looping like this. Next, I have to do a couple things:

1. I have to get the Gieger Counter into the main loop instead of the S/R of the plus. It's fun but it's kind of wasted there. 2. Clearly there's plenty of space still on this board so I need to fill that space with MOAR. 3. Continue to configure the HX Stomp and the MC6.

Finally is the HX Stomp: https://line6.com/hx-stomp/  I have mixed feelings on this little dude. It *is* a great sounding unit for the size. I mean, wow for how big it is this thing is powerful and easily controlled. But, it is clearly designed for a gigging musician.

I'm mostly running this into my studio recording setup, so it took forever to make it sound clean with no hiss. If you're playing live it totally doesn't matter, but there's lots of settings that sound like they were sampled off an 8 TRAK casette in a Firebird in the 1960s.

That's probably a product of how they generate the amp models. They used to generate them with physics modeling but now they just record all the pedals and amps and extract the audio responses. Problem is, they seem to not do basic audio cleaning.

As in, I think a dude just turned a Marshall to 11 and shoved a mic in front of it, hit a few standard notes, then went home. No attempt to use noise canceling to remove hiss and hum when silent. They also have random sound levels which is terrible for recording.

So, if you get one then first thing is load up the HX Editor and do this: 1. Set all main out volumes to 0db. Some are at +10db and other -8db. 2. Set all high gain presets to have a gate on the front (or just use your own). 3. Change the global EQ to drop treble and bass.

Like, if you're mostly playing through one amp/cab with 4 pedals, then the Amplifierbox can easily replace all of them in a single pedal. You then can do quick toggle between 2 presets with clean/crunch switching on each and done. I know some folks who could use just this.