I just put lead guitars onto four songs and rhythm guitars onto two. My ears are ringing a little, everything sounds like mush, and by the time I finished my fingers weren’t doing what I told them anymore. I think I’m done for today.

I did a little experiment. I had my first taste of a wet/dry rig. Go look up That Pedal Show on youtube and you’ll find a slew of videos talking about wet/dry. The basics are, you play through two amps and put all of your modulation and timing effects into just one amp. That way you can seriously overuse the effect, but the dry signal coming out of the second amp makes it so the sound doesn’t turn to complete mud. The end result is supposed to be an epically huge, spacious, 3D kind of overall effect.

What I did today was super simple. Of my two amps, only one has a built in tremolo effect. The Vox AC15 has one, but the Fender Bassbreaker 15 does not. So, I put some tremolo on (even though I really never use that effect at all) and gave myself a mini-wet dry. The wet (effected) amp being the Vox, and the dry (no effect) amp being the Fender.

It was really simple. Nothing Earth shattering… but it did sound pretty cool. I put it on a rhythm part for one song, but only for two measures or so, and a little tiny bit on a couple of lead parts. I normally pan the two amps completely separate for rhythm parts (one fully to the left and the other fully to the right) but for leads I usually keep them panned together (both straight down the middle, usually). I think the effect is greatly lessened when the two signals aren’t spread out. We’ll see if I lose it in the mix.

I also tried to use my cheap little pitch shift pedal on one solo. It’s a Donner Harmonic Square. I’m pretty sure it’s just a clone of an Electro Harmonix Pitch Fork. The downside is the printing on the pedal is so incredibly small that I can’t read it, even with my glasses on. I have to take a picture and zoom all the way in. It’s crazy, see?

I wanted to mix the dry signal with a pitch a seventh above, because Trevor Rabin, ya know? Unfortunately, the +/-7 setting actually is a +/-5. There doesn’t seem to be a seventh setting at all, even though the labeling on the pedal says there is. I went with an octave down, because for years and years I always had a DoD Octaplus pedal that was just an octave divider (it let the original signal through, but mixed in another pitch, one octave down). Sadly, that trusty old warrior of a pedal is dead now, but I can get the same effect with this cheap little thing (it actually tracks a little better than the Octaplus did… not to speak ill of the dead or anything). I was a little annoyed though… I wanted me some Owner of a Lonely Heart sounding stuff. Oh well.

So, here’s a picture of all my stuff. Hopefully I’ll get another mix done tonight. Not for a while though, my ears really feel like mush. I think I had my headphones up a tad too loud today.