A little trick to make better use of my amp......

[Fridge]

First off, I'm sure this is nothing startling and I am certainly not intending to teach granny to suck eggs here, but I thought this was a good use of some basic gear I had lying around.

 

The amp is a Blackstar Stage 60 and is a cracking amp...it has three channels, but to be honest, its all about the OD1 channel for me....I'm not wild about the clean channel, and the OD2 channel doesnt clean up as well with volume rollback.

 

I have a Boss GT8 which has served me well, and although I am not interested in the amp models, the effects are pretty decent.

 

So what I did was to connect the gt8 to the amp using the 4 cable method..this has the advantage of putting the amps preamp in the gt8s effect loop, and vice versa.

 

Then, I selected a bank of the gt8 (it has 4 patches per bank) and what I did was to keep the amp on the od1 channel.....on the first patch, I used the expression pedal as a volume pedal....I had to make sure I set it to the slowest curve as that mimics the effect of the guitar vol knob...I rolled back the volume till I got myself a nice warm clean....I then disabled the sweep of the pedal so the patch would be left at that volume....I then went to the next channel, and did the same, but set it to a nice low gain crunch, next channel to a classic/hard rock sound, then on the fourth had the vol on max, and added in an overdrive on the gt8 that I actually liked (only one or two of these).

 

The result of this is that I have a nice controller giving me effectively four channels......in each bank I also have a simple eq boost for leads, and I can activate wah by pressing down the expression pedal.

 

This gets me through about 80-90 per cent of a gig, with the odd song that requires more effects either being dealt with by a switch to manual mode, or by simply placing them on another bank.

 

As I say, nothing startling, but good use of some non-expensive gear I thik.